Courses

Affiliate faculty teach courses on visual cultures every semester at both the undergraduate and graduate levels to enhance the interdisciplinarity of the Center.

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Fall 2024

CVC Courses

ART HISTORY / AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES

Art History 801: Historiography, Theory and Methods in Visual Culture

Professor, Laurie Beth Clark, Art Department

Meets Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5 to 7 PM

Thia seminar offers an overview of the study of visual cultures, a dynamic, multi-stranded, and still changing field in critical dialogue with cultural studies and performance studies,  ethnic studies and critical race theory, queer studies and feminist theory, trans studies and theory, disability studies and crip theory. It pursues multiple critical and visual practices using theories and methods important to the field’s formation as well as those driving the field’s future, though the selected readings are necessarily partial and the syllabus is an invitation to further study.  We will take advantage of the programming of the Center for Visual Cultures to frame our encounter with the leading questions driving the field.  This means specifically an engagement with the CVC 2024-2025 theme of abolition.

The seminar emphasizes the development of essential skills in critical reading, research, analysis, writing, and presentation presentation methods. While is the core requirement for the Doctoral Minor and Graduate Certificate in Visual Cultures, our commitment to interdisciplinarity means that graduate students from any field or program might benefit.  The course assists students in the formation of a network and intellectual community while discovering research resources to support their own work. In addition to weekly readings and discussion, work for the course will include the generation of “burning questions” as the catalysts of inquiry, examining and analyzing the visual, producing and delivering oral presentations, and writing work that corresponds to specific kinds of professional writing. Students will produce scholarly writing at a scale and for an audience appropriate to their own research agendas and will also produce visual materials as a form of knowledge production.  (For example, students in ITS may produce significant seminar papers suitable for revision toward the Prelim A portfolio while art students might develop hybrid investigations that serves their studio practices).

 

The following visual cultures courses are offered in Fall 24 Semester. 

GERMAN

German 804: Critical Media Theory

Professor Mary Hennessy

Do media determine our situation? What are the overlapping relationships among media and critique, ideology and epistemology, technology and experience? Are histories of gender and sexuality, labor, fascism, and colonialism also media histories? Taking Walter Benjamin’s foundational “Work of Art” essay as our starting point, we will explore these and other questions through a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives on media and mediation: critical theory, (German) media theory, film studies, sound studies, memory studies, and more. Considered together, these critical traditions and interdisciplinary fields highlight the urgency of attending to the ways in which new modes of storing, transmitting, and processing information have exerted pressure on the production, consumption, and reception of cultural artifacts.

 

Spring 2024

Visual Cultures Courses

ART HISTORY/ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Art History 802/Env St 922: Historical and Cultural Methods in Environmental Research
Professor Anna Andrzejewski
Tuesdays 4:00 – 7:00 PM, Elvehjem L166
***This course meets the requirement for CVC Doctoral Minor and Graduate Certificate.

This course introduces students to methods useful in what is broadly termed “environmental humanities.” In addition to weekly discussions focused on a particular set of methods, students will work on applying methods to a class research project on UW’s Arboretum in preparation for the Center for Culture, History and Environment’s 2024 Place-Based Workshop.

The “CHE Methods Seminar” explores a variety of research methods and methodologies used in the “environmental humanities,” a growing field that encapsulates areas of humanistic research connected with the environment and environmental problems, including (but not limited to) ecocriticism, environmental art history, environmental justice, environmental history, science and technology studies, and cultural anthropology. The seminar explores these methods in depth while we also consider the broader implications of research ethics and practices, exploring topics such as positionally, bias, and human subject research.

Learning outcomes of the course:
· Familiarize yourself with methods used in “Environmental Humanities” research through readings and/or presentations about these methods, discussing them in class, and reflecting on these methods relative to your own work.
· Explore ways in which these (and other) methods relate to the ethics of research practices, environmental justice, decolonialism, intersectionality, and multi-species work through discussions and written reflections.
· Apply methods and ideas in the course by completing a collaborative project with UW Arboretum related to the cultural landscape.

 

The following courses can be applied to the CVC Doctoral Minor and Graduate Certificate.

 

INTERDISCIPLINARY THEATRE STUDIES/SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE

Span 802: Spectating the Real in Latinx American Theatre/Performance
Professor Paola S. Hernández
Wednesdays 3:00 – 5:00 PM, 1120 Van Hise
***The class will be taught in Spanish.

As Augusto Boal has stated, the theatre can be a political tool to encourage the “spect-actor” to be part of a movement or an experience. This course will study the impact of political theatrical and performance works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in different countries in Latin America as well as Latinx in the U.S. We will focus on a variety of manifestations of how theatre and performance propel types of cultural and political activism, engage and stimulate the audience, and encourage us to think of the “process” of creation, movement, and involvement. Different theoretical frameworks (political theatre, scenarios, performance constellations, theater of the real, postdramatic theatre, participatory performance) will allow us to focus on both traditional political theater and digital networks of protest (the theatre of the oppressed, teatro campesino, teatro abierto, teatroxlaidentidad, #YoSoy132, NiUnaMenos, NiUnaMas, Lastesis, Expresión Mole). We will also explore how theatre, performance and visual artists respond to repressive governments as well as identity and gender politics in symbolic ways, as seen in the work of Griselda Gambaro, Federico León, Lola Arias, Mariano Pensotti, Guillermo Calderón, Manuela Infante, Mariana de Althaus, Regina José Galindo, Mauricio Kartun, Violeta Luna, Teatro Línea de Sombra, Lagartijas tiradas al sol, Guillermo Gómez Peña, and Xandra Ibarra.

 

COMMUNICATION ARTS

COM669: Film Theory
Professor Darshana Mini
Mondays and Wednesdays 2:30 PM – 3:45 PM; Screening: Monday 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM

This course outlines how theoretical engagement with film as a cultural object through the lens of art, philosophy and history can help in understanding its form, social functions, and effects. We will be looking at the relationship between theory and practice by engaging with individual theorists, specific philosophical traditions and how ideas have developed, borrowed, and mutated as they took shape in the analytical traditions. We will be closely analyzing the historical contexts in which these theories take shape and trace the shifts in theoretical approaches in both classical and contemporary film theory.

 

COMMUNICATION ARTS/ ITALIAN 

Communication Arts 460/Italian 460: Italian Cinema
Professor Patrick Rumble
Tuesdays and Thursdays: 2:30 PM – 3:45 PM

This course offers a survey of the history of Italian cinema from the Second World War up to today, examining the work of key filmmakers in the Italian art cinema tradition, including Rossellini, De Sica, Antonioni, Pasolini Fellini, Moretti, Marazzi, Rohrwacher, and Gioli.  Students will be introduced to important film movements and trends in Italian Cinema, including Futurism, Neorealism, the Commedia all’italiana, Auteurist cinema, Feminist filmmaking, Avant-Garde film, the cinema of Migration, and Environmental cinema in Italy.

 

The following visual cultures courses are offered in Spring 24 Semester. 

 

ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

ASIAN630: Woman Make Movies
Professor Hieyoon Kim
Tuesdays 4:00 – 6:30 PM

In systems of representation from fine art to mainstream film to advertising, women have been constructed as “Woman” – “to-be-looked-at,” in critic Laura Mulvey’s oft-quoted phrase – or rendered altogether invisible through ideological assumptions about race, class, and body image. What happens when female-identified artists, audiences, and theorists look back? The first unit of the course will examine some of the canonical texts of feminist film theory, covering several major topics: the practice of looking (gaze), representation, and feminist reading practices. We will read these texts alongside relevant films from across the world and consider in what ways these texts are still relevant to our time. The second unit of the course will focus on contemporary Asian films by women that embody a critical capacity for expanding our understanding of the aforementioned major topics. We will pay attention to a number of different ways these films (and their creators) challenge the existing norms and systems.

 

ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

ASIAN433/833: Two Koreas: Aesthetics and Politics
Professor Hieyoon Kim
Wednesdays  4:00 – 6:30 PM

Today, the Korean peninsula is home to two different societies: a pop-culture powerhouse and a geopolitical pariah. This striking contrast, however, belies a shared history and heritage. Taking the long view of the emergence and divergence of both polities, this seminar explores Korea’s remarkable transformation over the second half of the twentieth century, a period that witnessed colonial liberation as well as devastating war, political repression as well as cultural efflorescence, economic vitality as well as crushing famine. Among the topics examined are colonial collaboration and resistance, Korea in the Cold War order, ethnicnationalism, postwar industrial and economic reforms, and the global consumption of Korean culture. While working closely with a wide range of visual materials, we will pay close attention to  the politics of images, the role that images play in producing cultural meaning, visuality and power relations, and images as forms of visual communication. We will also examine how images circulate through our digital environments and networks, how they shape our perception of the two Koreas, and how we can diversify and even challenge this perception.

 

ENGLISH

ENGL/TD 732: Advanced Research in Theatre History, 1700-Present
Professor Mary Trotter
Thursdays 9:30 AM – noon

This course offers students the opportunity to acquaint themselves with some of the significant contributions to the art of theatre from around 1700 to the mid- 20th century. Along with discussing the aesthetics of theatre and dramatic literature during this time period, we will also consider each theatre movement’s dynamic interaction within a particular cultural milieu, allowing us to think about matters like  science and technology’s role in theatrical production and invention; and the varied ways in which theatres have cultivated (and been cultivated by) audiences along gender, class, race, and political lines. Please note that this is a fast-moving survey, intended for students wishing to build up a broad overview of the theatrical past.  Students will participate in lively conversation, give an in-class presentation and write a research paper of approximately 5000 words.

 

ART HISTORY

AH/Asian 428/AH 779: Visual Cultures of India
Professor Preeti Chopra
Mon/Wed 4 – 5:15 PM   Elvehjem L150

This lecture course concentrates on the image and image complexes (art, sculpture, advertisements, photography, television, and cinema), material culture (such as, clothing), and environments (architecture, urban planning, and public rituals) of India.

During the semester, we will examine South Asian visual cultures from the ancient to the modern periods.  This historical trajectory will be complemented by a critical focus on selected thematic issues. During these moments we will compare and contrast cases studies from across India, spatially and temporally.  These historical ruptures, or time travels, will allow us to see the continuities and discontinuities between the past and present.  Thematic issues and ideas that may be examined in this class include sexuality, the representation of women, patronage, cultural encounter and cultural synthesis, iconoclasm, the relationship between landscape and architecture, rethinking the canon, ways of seeing, art and craft, the sacred and secular, colonialism, modernism, nationalism, and the pleasures of Indian cinema. No prior knowledge of India is necessary.

Fall 2023

CVC Courses

ART HISTORY / AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES

Art History / Afro-American Studies 801:
Historiography, Theory and Methods in Visual Culture
Professor Michael Peterson
Thursdays, 5:00 – 7:00 PM

Prepares students for graduate work in the transdisciplinary study of Visual Cultures by building on the knowledge, theories, and methods that are fundamental to the discipline. This course develops skills in critical reading, research, analysis, writing, and oral presentation.

This seminar is the core requirement for the Doctoral Minor and Graduate Certificate in visual cultures, a field in which analytic attention to gender, sexuality and race is integral. The seminar charts the formation and history of the dynamic, multi-stranded, and still changing field in its critical dialogue with cultural studies, critical race theory and black study, feminist theory, queer theory, trans studies and theory, disability studies and crip theory and performance studies. It seeks to build a practice-based knowledge of the theories and methods important to the field’s formation as well as those driving the field’s future. You will develop a set of skills in critical reading, research, analysis, writing, and presentation (including visual presentation methods) that will be of use to you throughout graduate school and in your professional life beyond. Toward these goals, the course has three main dimensions. As your introduction to the Doctoral Minor and Graduate Certificate here, the course will take advantage of the programming of the Center for Visual Cultures to frame your encounter with the leading questions driving the field, assist in facilitating the formation of a network and intellectual community, and help point you toward the research resources here that may support your workAs your introduction to practices in the study of visual cultures, the course explores the controversies that drove the field’s formation, its complex relations to various disciplines and the issues, challenges, and debates fueling the ongoing transformations of the field. The readings are necessarily selective and partial. Thus, you are encouraged to use the syllabus as a map leading you to deepen your knowledge through further study. As a practicum, the seminar also emphasizes the development of essential skills in critical reading and analysis, primary and secondary research methods, the writing of various kinds of professional prose, oral presentation, and oral response to questions that are vital to your success in graduate study and future viability in the field. In addition to weekly readings and discussion, work for the course will include the generation of burning questions as the catalysts of inquiry, examining and analyzing the visual, producing and delivering oral presentations, and writing work that corresponds to specific kinds of professional writing. As this course is designed to enhance your professional formation, you are strongly encouraged to navigate the course architecture of readings and assignments according to the needs and dictates of your own research and developing areas of specialization.

Spring 2023

CVC Courses

ART HISTORY / AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIESArt History / Afro-American Studies 802: Topics in Visual Culture: Caribbean EntanglementsProfessor Guillermina De FerrariWednesdays, 2:30 – 5:00 PMIn the Caribbean, global warming, the legacy of slavery, and neocolonial experiments in both late capitalism and late socialism shape the way humans perceive and manage their lives. With the understanding that being human is a praxis, as Sylvia Wynter notes, and that art is a practical philosophy, this course explores, via contemporary Caribbean art, how disasters intervene in the construction and disruption of the collective, how people reshape and reinvent the social world in response, and how the arts envision new forms of being in the world.

Other Visual Cultures Courses

ARTArt 908: HungerProfessor Laurie Beth ClarkMondays, 5:00 – 8:00 PM

According to the UN, roughly 690 million people live with hunger. Yet hunger is not natural and it is not an accident. Hunger is caused by both malign and inadvertent actions, as well as collective inaction–and hunger can be addressed through collective action. Essential work has been done by many who feel the call to act in response to the ongoing crisis.How are the arts useful in the fight to reduce or eliminate hunger? Artists have worked to raise money and to represent or dramatize hunger. Artists are often called upon to aid in communication and in making emotional appeals to the public. Sometimes people turn to the arts to carry us through periods of deprivation. But it is a very limited understanding of the arts (and of hunger) to suggest that it provides only surplus rather than core value. If we understand hunger as a failure of imagination (about how society could be shaped), then artists have a crucial role in devising creative and resilient strategies.Corporeal hunger is exacerbated by other kinds of hunger that cannot be easily located in the body and yet are experienced as material reality. Perhaps because of this reach, hunger also has a long history of deployment in politics and weaponization in geopolitics. Self-starvation and other agential hungers have historically played a significant role as responses to violence, trauma and injustice, from the hunger strikes of political prisoners to the self-denial of sustenance by adolescents seeking ways to cope in a world that is beyond their control. ‘Disordered’ eating intertwines in contemporary works of fat activist politics that challenge social stigmas and discrimination. Hunger cannot be understood without attention to class, race, gender, and sexuality, and it raises key questions about disability and bodily agency.At the heart of this seminar is the troubling of the opposition between corporeal and metaphorical hungers.We will explore how ‘actual hunger’ is imbricated in desires and motivations that are not reducible to biological nutrition. Clearly, hunger constrains the fundamental human right to life in a way that is brutally material, but it also stifles the fundamental human right to thrive. Grief for all the deaths suffuses the entire body as a desperate hungering for hope and agency. Moreover, self-imposed hunger has been and continues to be an activist strategy, and hunger is a significant metaphor—hunger for freedom, hunger for knowledge—that permeates our culture.COMMUNICATION ARTS

Communication Arts 610: Visual Culture
Professor Anirban Baishya

Our age is often characterized as the age of images. This course is designed to help students understand the implications of living in a society saturated with image-based media. This includes, but is not limited to moving images, photographs and more recently, the multimedia environment of the internet. Media saturation also means naturalization; this course is built upon the premise that de-naturalizing media is a precondition for media literacy and political awareness. The aim of this course is to enable students to recognize the constructed nature of images; for this reason, we will cover a range of theoretical approaches and texts and mediaforms. We will read canonical texts such as Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (text and TV) and Roland Barthes’ “The Rhetoric of the Image” and use the conceptual base from these to understand forms such as advertising and news. Images today do not exist in isolation, but exist in networks along with other images, text, performance, and sound. To that end, this course will also examine contemporary visual culture operates in multimedia networks including objects such as memes, GIFs, selfies, and short videos, as well as emerging technologies such as virtual reality. We will also examine how images can be repurposed, remixed and (re)appropriated in the age of the digital. In doing so we will shuttle back and forth between traditional and new media to ask: what do images do, how do they speak, and how do we speak through them? The class will be divided into modules that deal with conceptual themes that will equip students with the analytical skills that are required for sustained critical engagement with media-forms. Possible topics include, but are not limited to images and iconicity, images and self/community expression, visual archives/counter-archives, and images of/images as evidence. Images are powerful: so, we will always keep an eye towards questions of power, race, class, and gender. The class imagines an active and immersed participant: our work together will involve discussions of the texts we read and the images we encounter, as well as engage in practice-based critical work as and when the sessions demand.

Communication Arts 460 / Italian 460: Italian FilmProfessor Patrick RumbleLecture: Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:00 – 11:50 AMThis course offers a survey of the history of Italian cinema from the Second World War up to today, examining the work of key filmmakers in the Italian art cinema tradition, including Rossellini, De Sica, Antonioni, Pasolini, Cavani, Fellini, Moretti, Rohrwacher, and Gioli.  Students will be introduced to important film movements and trends in Italian Cinema, including Futurism, Neorealism, the Commedia all’italiana, Auteurist cinema, Feminist filmmaking, Avant-Garde film and Environmental cinema in Italy.  ENGLISH

English 859: The Road to Performance StudiesProfessor Paola HernándezWednesdays 4:00 – 7:00 PM

This course is designed to understand and analyze the foundational and interdisciplinary stakes of performance studies as well as to study the evolution, development, and application of this field since the 1960’s to today. Students will read an array of readings focusing on the productive relationship between different and relatable fields of study, from theatre, folklore, anthropology, sociology, and cultural theory to gender and queer studies. The material will vary and contain the basic performance studies scholars (Richard Schechner, Dwight Conquerwood, Shannon Jackson, Ervin Goffman, Peggy Phelan, Joseph Roach, Victor Turner, Diana Taylor), to other iterations of how gender (Butler, Dolan, Halberstam), to theatre (Grotowski, Boal, Meyerhold, Barba), and race (E Patrick Johnson, Tavia Nyong’o, Chela Sandoval, José E Muñoz), highlight the interconnections and social practices of the term. We will use theatre plays, performances, museum installations, activism, events, autoethnography, and visual art as examples of the intricacy between the theory of performance as reciprocal acts of behaving and perceiving as we pay close attention to the societal and political dimension. Students interested in performance studies, gender studies, feminism, theatre, literature, visual culture, art, art history, and anthropology should benefit from this course.

Fall 2022

Required CVC Course

Art History / Afro-American Studies 801: Historiography, Theory and Methods in Visual Culture — meets with GWS 720
Professor Jill Casid
Thursdays 4:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L170

Prepares student for graduate work in the transdisciplinary study of Visual Cultures by building on the knowledge, theories, and methods that are fundamental to the discipline. It will develop skills in critical reading, research, analysis, writing, and oral presentation.

This seminar is the core requirement for the Doctoral Minor and Graduate Certificate in the transdisciplinary study of visual cultures, a field in which analytic attention to gender, sexuality and race is integral. The seminar charts the formation and history of the dynamic, multi-stranded, and still changing field in its critical dialogue with cultural studies, critical race theory and black study, feminist theory, queer theory, trans studies and theory, disability studies and crip theory and performance studies. It seeks to build a practice-based knowledge of the theories and methods important to the field’s formation as well as those driving the field’s future. You will develop a set of skills in critical reading, research, analysis, writing, and presentation (including visual presentation methods) that will be of use to you throughout graduate school and in your professional life beyond. Toward these goals, the course has three main dimensions. As your introduction to the Doctoral Minor and Graduate Certificate here, the course will take advantage of the programming of the Center for Visual Cultures to frame your encounter with the leading questions driving the field, assist in facilitating the formation of a network and intellectual community, and help point you toward the research resources here that may support your workAs your introduction to practices in the study of visual cultures, the course explores the controversies that drove the field’s formation, its complex relations to various disciplines and the issues, challenges, and debates fueling the ongoing transformations of the field. The readings are necessarily selective and partial. Thus, you are encouraged to use the syllabus as a map leading you to deepen your knowledge through further study. As a practicum, the seminar also emphasizes the development of essential skills in critical reading and analysis, primary and secondary research methods, the writing of various kinds of professional prose, oral presentation, and oral response to questions that are vital to your success in graduate study and future viability in the field. In addition to weekly readings and discussion, work for the course will include the generation of burning questions as the catalysts of inquiry, examining and analyzing the visual, producing and delivering oral presentations, and writing work that corresponds to specific kinds of professional writing. As this course is designed to enhance your professional formation, you are strongly encouraged to navigate the course architecture of readings and assignments according to the needs and dictates of your own research and developing areas of specialization.

Potential Visual Culture Electives

ART

Art 409: Digital Fabrication Studio
Professor Anna Campbell
TuTh 4:30 PM – 7:00 PM
HUMANITIES 6421 (4 credits)

Introduction to the practice and application of digital fabrication technologies in an artistic context with an emphasis on extending and integrating with traditional material approaches to art production. Includes theoretical readings devoted to the implications of digital and machine technologies on art practice.

Art 448 Lab-008 (37355): Art, Philosophy and Education
Professor John Baldacchino
F 10:30 AM – 1:00 PM

Drawing inspiration from all the creative arts (visual, literary and performance), this class invites students from a wide variety of artistic and academic backgrounds to engage with big ideas in art, education and in our lives such as: knowledge and expression; learning and unlearning; the beautiful and the ugly; identity, diversity and society; the arts and their subjects; creativity, education and the knowable self; space, time and place; aesthetics and form; irony, comedy and tragedy; the body and identity.

We will explore these topics through group discussion, seminar-based activities, essaying and journaling, collaborative work, and through a range of studio practices that align with students’ interests, such as writing, performance, video, and other forms of creative expression. While this class is informed by the practices of discovery within the arts, philosophy, and education, you are encouraged to enroll if the themes interest you, no matter your major. The class is most appropriate for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students.

ART HISTORY

Art History 354/600: Cross-Cultural Arts Around the Atlantic Rim: 1800 to the Present
Professor Jill Casid
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L150

Interdisciplinary study of cross-cultural exchange and conflict, focusing on the visual arts, with sections on literature, film and music from the Americas, Africa and Europe.

COMMUNICATION ARTS

Communication Arts 613: Francophone Female Filmmakers: Varda, Akerman, Denis
Professor Kelley Conway


Caption: “Agnès Varda shooting La Pointe Courte, 1954.”

French and francophone cinema offers a particularly rich cultural marketplace for female directors working in art cinema. This course examines the work of three important filmmakers: Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, and Claire Denis. We will study their aesthetic commitments, the production and reception histories of their films, photographs, and installations, and the connections to the socio-cultural contexts of their time. Films to be studied include Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1955), Le Bonheur (1966), Vagabond (1985) and The Gleaners and I (2000); Akerman’s Saute ma ville, Je tu il elle, Jeanne Dielman, and Les Rendezvous d’Anna; and Denis’ Chocolat (1988), I Can’t Sleep (1994), Beau Travail (1999), and 35 Shots of Rum (2008).

ENGLISH

English 822: The Labor of Images
Professor Sarah Ann Wells
Tuesdays 10:00 AM -12:30 PM

Following decades of consigning the concept of labor to residual status, scholars in the U.S. academy have recently begun to rethink its centrality for the humanities. Art historians and visual artists have been at the vanguard of this turn to labor, with literary studies following closely behind. This interdisciplinary seminar has a twofold purpose: one, to analyze both classic and contemporary critical theory on labor; and second, to consider the stakes of thinking labor through the arts — including the artist-qua-worker (or precariat), the polemical concept of immaterial labor, the art market and its relationship to capitalism, and the artwork’s dual status as both representation and index of labor. The last third of the semester will turn towards labor resistance — namely, the strike and its sister struggles (the protest, occupation, desertion). By moving among critical theory and artworks, we will map out dramatic shifts in work’s character and value from the late 19th century to the present — as well as what has persisted across this period.

This course has an additional goal: to reflect on what labor means for us as knowledge workers in the 21st century. Indeed, some theorists have posited the university — rather than the art market — as the new “social factory.” Without falling into the trap of presentism, our discussions we will draw from our specific disciplinary formations, as well as past and current work experiences, when approaching the core texts of the course. Students working in all periods, regions, and disciplines, including MFA candidates, are welcome.


Still from Blow for Blow (Coup Pour Coup, Marin Karmitz, France, 1972)

Still from Hatmakers (Chapeleiros, Adrian Cooper, Brazil, 1983)

GENDER AND WOMENS’ STUDIES

GWS 410: Special Topics in Gender and Visual Culture: Feminist Art & Visual Culture
Professor Anna Campbell
TuTh 9:30AM – 10:45AM – STERLING 1333 (3 credits)

In the wake of recent institutional gestures towards the recognition of feminist art, this course will focus on conditions under which feminist art was and is created, methods by which feminist works of art were and are generated, and issues that have and continue to be key to the field. A plurality of feminisms and attention to the intersections of race, class, and sexuality with gender and sex will shape thematic investigations of practices including institutional critique, craft, performance, and collaboration, among others. The structure of this course will reflect the hybridized practices of much feminist art, in combining text-, writing- and studio-based research projects that employ various feminist tactics. No prior studio-based art practice required.

Spring 2022

Art History 802:Topics in Visual Culture: Latinx Art, Performance, and Visual CultureProfessor Paola HernándezW 2:30 PM – 5:00 PM Elvehjem L166Photo credit: Yolanda López, Xandra Ibarra, Luis Jimenez

Latinx artists—those of Latin American background in the US, either first generation or those who have been living in the US for a longer period of time—have been central in the production of cultural forms in the US. However, their visibility in museums, galleries, exhibits, and theatre productions remain marginal, both in the ways we study them and in the way the market exhibits their work. This course will delve into the world of US Latinx artists from the twentieth and twenty-first century, paying close attention to issues of race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexuality. Some visual artists we will study are Laura Aguilar, Yolanda López, Carmen Argote, Xandra Ibarra, Nao Bustamante, Manuel Acevedo, Candida Alvarez, Judith Baca, Alma López, Judithe Hernández, Rodrígez Calero, Rafa Esparza, Luis Jiménez, groups ASCO, La Pocha Nostra, among others. Through a wide range of theoretical readings on queer studies, crip theory, extractivism, race, migration studies, this course aims to put Latinx artists on the map, to promote understanding of their art within and outside the US, and to explore multiple “ways of seeing” from an array of historical, political, and social contexts.

– – – – – –Art History 800 / Asian 630:India Looks East: Visual & Spatial Cultures of AsiaProfessor Preeti ChopraM 4:30 PM – 7:00 PMElvehjem L170

With a focus on modern South Asia, this seminar will also look to the East of India to explore the visual and spatial cultures of Southeast and East Asia.  For millennia, these different regions have shared a connected history.  However, since European colonial rule, our attention has often turned to the West.  This seminar brings South Asia into conversation with Southeast and East Asia, and sometimes to other parts of the world.  We will study selected aspects of the religious, visual and material cultures, as well as the architecture and urbanism of these regions.  In doing so, we will begin to explore the rich diversity of the visual and spatial cultures of South, Southeast and East Asia.

– – – – – – Art History 779 “meets with” Art History / Asian 428:Visual Cultures of IndiaProfessor Preeti ChopraMW 2:30 PM – 3:45 PMElvehjem L150

This lecture course concentrates on the image and image complexes (art, sculpture, advertisements, photography, television, and cinema), material culture (such as, clothing), and environments (architecture, urban planning, and public rituals) of India.

During the semester, we will examine South Asian visual cultures from the ancient to the modern periods.  This historical trajectory will be complemented by a critical focus on selected thematic issues. During these moments we will compare and contrast cases studies from across India, spatially and temporally.  These historical ruptures, or time travels, will allow us to see the continuities and discontinuities between the past and present.  Thematic issues and ideas that may be examined in this class include sexuality, the representation of women, patronage, cultural encounter and cultural synthesis, iconoclasm, the relationship between landscape and architecture, rethinking the canon, ways of seeing, art and craft, the sacred and secular, colonialism, modernism, nationalism, and the pleasures of Indian cinema. No prior knowledge of India is necessary.

– – – – – –

Art History 430 / 600 “meets with” LACIS 440: Latin American Photography: Freaks, Geeks, and Revolutionaries
Professor Guillermina De Ferrari
TR 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM
Elvehjem L150

We will explore Latin American photography from the Cuban Revolution to the present within the frameworks of cultural studies, visual culture, and theory of photography. We will study how Latin American photographers have found distinctive ways to represent affect in political and ecological disasters, how they challenge established ways of seeing and saying, and find poetry in unexpected places. We will focus on work by visionary and eccentric artists from Latin America and the Caribbean. This is an undergrad/grad course. Graduate students will have additional research requirements.

– – – – – –

Communication Arts 418/ Gender and Women’s Studies 418
Professor Darshana Mini
MW 2:30 PM – 3:45 PM
Vilas 4028

This course examines various images of gender and sexuality in the media, with a focus on contemporary media in the U.S. Using theories from cultural studies, film and media studies, and gender and sexuality studies, we will explore different processes and practices of gender and sexuality as they areunderstood through today’s mediatedworld. We will look at the way that gender and sexuality are constructed through social, cultural, and economic forces, and the way that these identities intersect with other social identities such as race, ethnicity, and class. Through readings and class discussions we will consider the way that media impact our understanding of feminism and post-feminism, violence, celebrity, consumer culture, and activism.

– – – – – –Environmental Studies 922 / Art History 867Methods in Environmental ResearchProfessor Anna AndrzejewskiTuesdays, 4:00 PM – 6:30 PMScience Hall 110

This course introduces graduate students to different disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods for studying past environmental change, its manifestations on the cultural landscape, and the human cultural contexts within which such change occurs. The course explores the disparate forms of evidence that can be used to reconstruct past environmental changes and their human meanings. The course also strives to build a strong sense of community among graduate students and faculty members at UW-Madison who share an interest in past environmental change by creating a context within which students from different departments and programs can work together while also getting to know faculty members associated with the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE).  Image caption: Blackhawk Island, Summer 2021(photo by A. Andrzejewski)

– – – – – –Italian 460 / Communication Arts 460: Italian FilmProfessor Patrick RumbleTuTh 11:00 AM – 11:50 AM (+discussion section)Course Options: 50% Graduate Coursework Requirement

This course offers a survey of the history of Italian cinema from the Second World War up to today, examining the work of key filmmakers in the Italian art cinema tradition, including Rossellini, De Sica, Antonioni, Pasolini, Cavani, Bertolucci, Fellini, Moretti, and Gioli.  Students will be introduced to important film movements and trends in Italy including Futurism, Neorealism, the Commedia all’italiana, Auteurist cinema, Feminist filmmaking, Avant-Garde film and Environmental cinema.

– – – – – –

Spanish 861: Environmental Humanities: Ecocriticism and Environmental Cultural Studies in Latin America and Spain
Professor Kata Beilin
Wednesdays, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Van Hise 1124
Ecocriticism arises from an awareness of the environmental crisis and seeks a new language that can re-connect the reader with the Earth, by drawing our attention to the fact that we are a part of the environment. Ecocriticism highlights ethical and aesthetic values, as well as ways of life, and designs that have contributed to the current crisis. Criticism that reads literature as part of the world, and not as a separate space as in some earlier schools of literary criticism, requires an interdisciplinary approach. This is where the Environmental Humanities emerge. Libby Robin, one of its founders, posits “understanding humans geologically and other life forms ethically.” This type of understanding can only be built by bringing together knowledge of the sciences and the humanities. Robin postulates that humans are part of the earth, but also implies bringing non-human life forms into politics. Mountains, forests, rivers, and animals have been part of the social life of indigenous peoples who have never lived apart from them. The new visions and new concepts of the environmental humanities, ecocriticism and literature are frequently inspired by the knowledge of indigenous peoples, as well as the practices of peasants who have lived on the fringes of modernity in a symbiosis with the environment. In this class you will read foundational texts of Ecocriticism, and Environmental Humanities, as well as essays explaining new sub-platforms and allied fields of Environmental Humanities, such as Energy Humanities, Chemo-ethnographies, New Materialisms, Science and Technology Studies, and last but not least, Indigenous Studies. We will read Latin American and Iberian novels and watch fiction films and documentaries, and ponder on graffiti that are concerned with the present and future societies and their environments.

– – – – – –

*There are many more courses that could potentially count as electives towards the PhD Minor in Visual Cultures. Please consult with your primary advisor and the Director of the Center for Visual Cultures, Professor Paola Hernández.

Fall 2021

Fall 2021 CVC Courses

*Required course for the PhD Minor and MA Certificate in Visual Cultures

AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES / ART HISTORY 801
Professor Jill Casid
Tuesdays, 4:00 – 6:30 p.m.

Prepares student for graduate work in the transdisciplinary study of Visual Cultures by building on the knowledge, theories, and methods that are fundamental to the discipline. It will develop skills in critical reading, research, analysis, writing, and oral presentation.

This seminar is the core requirement for the Doctoral Minor and Graduate Certificate in the transdisciplinary study of visual cultures, a field in which analytic attention to gender, sexuality and race is integral. The seminar charts the formation and history of the dynamic, multi-stranded, and still changing field in its critical dialogue with cultural studies, critical race theory and black study, feminist theory, queer theory, trans studies and theory, disability studies and crip theory and performance studies. It seeks to build a practice-based knowledge of the theories and methods important to the field’s formation as well as those driving the field’s future. You will develop a set of skills in critical reading, research, analysis, writing, and presentation (including visual presentation methods) that will be of use to you throughout graduate school and in your professional life beyond. Toward these goals, the course has three main dimensions. As your introduction to the Doctoral Minor and Graduate Certificate here, the course will take advantage of the programming of the Center for Visual Cultures to frame your encounter with the leading questions driving the field, assist in facilitating the formation of a network and intellectual community, and help point you toward the research resources here that may support your workAs your introduction to practices in the study of visual cultures, the course explores the controversies that drove the field’s formation, its complex relations to various disciplines and the issues, challenges, and debates fueling the ongoing transformations of the field. The readings are necessarily selective and partial. Thus, you are encouraged to use the syllabus as a map leading you to deepen your knowledge through further study. As a practicum, the seminar also emphasizes the development of essential skills in critical reading and analysis, primary and secondary research methods, the writing of various kinds of professional prose, oral presentation, and oral response to questions that are vital to your success in graduate study and future viability in the field. In addition to weekly readings and discussion, work for the course will include the generation of burning questions as the catalysts of inquiry, examining and analyzing the visual, producing and delivering oral presentations, and writing work that corresponds to specific kinds of professional writing. As this course is designed to enhance your professional formation, you are strongly encouraged to navigate the course architecture of readings and assignments according to the needs and dictates of your own research and developing areas of specialization.

____________________________________________

Visual Cultures Electives

ART

Art 908, Section 2: Graduate Seminar on Collaboration in the Arts
Professors Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson
Tuesdays, 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Contemporary creative production in the arts is full of collaboration. The out-of-date image of the artist as a solo creative genius laboring in isolation is yielding ground to a model of mutual inspiration and aid. Collaboration takes many forms: There are long term and one-off partnerships, small teams and large groups.  There are many, many famous and successful collaboratives past and present: Gilbert & Sullivan, Gilbert & George, Critical Art Ensemble, Grand Fury, Goat Island, Split Britches, Group Material, KOS, Team Lab, Rimini Protocol, General Idea, My Barbarian, Guerilla Girls, Ant Farm, Africobra, the Harrisons, Marina Abramovic & Ulay, Elmgreen & Dragset, Charles & Ray Eames, Wachowski Sisters, Cohen Brothers…

Collaboration has always been an important part of production across the arts, but is often underrecognized. Examples include the famous post-facto acknowledgement of partnerships (Christo & Jean Claude, Edward & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen) as well as the way that the labor of dancers, actors, designers, and editors is routinely subsumed into auteur recognition for choreographers and directors. There are partnerships of artists with often unnamed master printers and there are individuals who subsume their identities in guerilla groups. There are bands and theatre companies whose member  identities are subsumed into the group name and others where (some) individuals are also recognized.

In Choices: Making an Art of Everyday Life, Marcia Tucker says:

Collaboration by its very nature bypasses formalist doctrine entirely. It emphasizes flexibility, spontaneity, and responsiveness rather than control, autonomy, and isolation. Work is not the result of a single endeavor, so that the aesthetic quality we have come to associate with individual genius is difficult, if not impossible, to locate. The concept of uniqueness and the admiration for a single artist’s abilities are at odds with work which is the result of more than one sensibility, and therefore constantly in flux.

This graduate seminar will approach collaborative production in the arts from multiple perspectives. The class will explore collaboration’s rich history as theory and as practice.  That is to say, we will read about the how and why of collaboration and we will make collaborative works. It is hoped that many variations on models for collaborative production will emerge. Discussions will give equal attention to the qualities of the product and to an evaluation of the collaborators’ process. Because the class is not segregated by discipline, our meetings will provide a unique opportunity to become familiar with other ways of working and perhaps to dispel the isolation that sometimes seems endemic in the arts.

The seminar will be taught collaboratively by Art Department Professors Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson, who have worked together as artists, educators, and scholars for many years, including the last eleven years as Spatula&Barcode. For more information, contact clarkandpeterson@gmail.co

ART HISTORY

Art History 867: Material History of the American Landscape
Prof. Anna Andrzejewski
Mondays, 2:30 – 5:00 p.m.

This course seeks to examine what we can learn about he history of what we now call the United States by examining visual and material culture. It considers how material culture – things like buildings or built features – relate to the natural environment, and thus its intersections with geology, climate, vegetation, non-human species, and ecology. It also offers tools for interpreting historical buildings and cultural landscape: different ways of mapping American space, and different ways of narrating change on the American landscape. Students will choose the kinds of spaces to discuss in class as well as research in individual projects. Possible topics might include: zoning; transportation network; military landscapes; extractive landscapes of the west. 

 ENGLISH

English 651: Latinx Theatre and Performance: Race, Politics, and Identity
Prof. Paola Hernández
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30-3:45 p.m.

This course aims to understand the Latinx experience in the U.S. through a variety of theater plays and performances. We will begin with the Chicano movement and Teatro Campesino (1960s) and move through the present to learn about  social and political situations that have made Latinx theater a cultural imperative. Themes of racial injustices, political protests, working rights, myth, and Hispanic traditions will be central to this class. All plays and performances will be in English. No need to know Spanish for this course.

English 803: Medieval/Modern: Here/There, Now/Then
Prof. Lisa Cooper
Mondays, 10 am-12:30 p.m. 

A seminar devoted to exploring the continuing presence of the medieval in the present, with topics to include race and racism, gender, and sexuality; nationalism, the colonial, and the post-colonial; canon formation and literary theory; periodization; environmentalism and ecocriticism; the digital humanities; and more. Readings/discussion will focus on secondary work, but students will engage with medieval primary texts of their choice (and in translation as needed) for presentations; final papers will be keyed to students’ own research areas.

Spring 2021

Spring 2021

 Required CVC Course for the Certificate and Minor

Art History / Afro-American Studies 802: Topics in Visual Cultures
Professor Laurie Beth Clark
lbclark@wisc.edu
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:00 – 10:30 am (online synchronous)

As contemporary scholarship moves beyond disciplinary boundaries to be defined by interdisciplinary “studies”, one challenge is to determine what topics fall within the purview of each of these emerging clusters. By soliciting new writing from prominent scholars of visual culture, the forthcoming A Concise Companion to Visual Culture posits the themes of Histories, Ecologies, Mediation, Agencies, and Politics to delineate to the discursive field of visual culture today.

Whereas the companion course AH 801 emphasizes theories and methods of Visual Culture, this course considers its objects of study. Taking the plurality of the term “topics” in its title literally, the seminar explores multiple topics (listed below). We will pair the anthology’s essays with our own selections of primary writing on each theme. Students will each choose one of the topics as a focal point for in-depth research and a project.

The course will also engage with the topics introduced by the five distinguished scholars that will be hosted by the Center for Visual Culture during Spring 2021. Seminar participants should be prepared to attend Zoom lectures and workshops by Ramón Rivera-Servera , Mel Y Chen, Lola Arias, Roshini Kempadoo, and possibly Violeta Luna in lieu of scheduled class hours.

Should the anthology be delayed beyond the start of the semester (as COVID-19 continues to cause unpredictable disruptions), we will build our semester around the theme of “2020” with units that focus on the visual cultures of the pandemic, electoral politics, racial justice and the environmental crises.

The course meets online Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 to 1030 AM. It will be taught by Laurie Beth Clark, a Professor in the Art Department, who is co-author of the aforementioned anthology’s essay on “Making.” Clark is an artist, professor in the Art Department, co-founder of the arts collaborative Spatula&Barcode, and scholar of trauma studies. For more information, contact lbclark@wisc.edu.

Potential Visual Cultures Electives

 ART

Art 470: Outside: COVID Culture & Art in the Open
Professor Michael Peterson
michael.w.peterson@wisc.edu
Fridays 10:00-12:00 & 1:00-4:00; Hybrid: online in the morning, outside in the afternoon

In this course we will study the contemporary culture of “outside” and make interdisciplinary arts explorations of it. After a morning discussion section online, we will meet outside to make and view work. Course assignments will include guided tours, sound works, installations, and collaborative events. Students from any major are welcome and no arts experience is required.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our relation to space and place. “Inside” has become a site of risk, but “staying inside” has been one of our few tools to slow the spread of the virus. This inside can produce side effects of isolation, loneliness, boredom, and anxiety. So we go outside.

Outside connects to many pressing issues in contemporary society. “The Outdoors”, for example, is an imaginary place that has long been constructed as the domain of white, masculine, middle-class leisure, and “birding while black” is comprehensible as a phrase because the Outside is so contested. Who has the “right to the city”? Why is so much of the outside arranged for motor vehicles?  “Whose streets? Our streets!” Who is outside for fun, and who by necessity? Who feels safe outside? Does spending time outside help us think about climate change?

(Dress in layers.) *Can be taken for graduate credit.

Art 511 / English 851: Performance Art/Performance Studies
Team taught by Professor Laurie Beth Clark and Professor Michael Peterson
clarkandpeterson@gmail.com
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 5:00 – 7:30 PM (online synchronous)

Next semester offers a rare opportunity to participate in a team-taught course by Professors Michael Peterson and Laurie Beth Clark. The interdisciplinary class will explore contemporary concepts and methods in both making and studying Performance. It is most suitable for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

Performance Art (also known as “Live Art” or simply “Performance”) has become established as a powerful means of expressing the self, exploring philosophical truths, and taking political action. Performance Studies has grown into a rigorously interdisciplinary field that uses the concept of performance to study a wide range of subjects, from political activism to professional wrestling to the performing arts–including Performance Art.

Stimulating practical assignments will allow students to investigate durational, theatrical, spatial, and relational approaches to performance making. Provocative weekly readings by significant scholars will expose students to diverse established and emerging theoretical perspectives.

We will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5 to 730 PM in a hybrid synchronous format, with options, if needed, for fully online (contingent on evolving pandemic circumstances). In practice, this will mean that we have our discussions on Zoom but may realize some art works in socially-distanced live formats.

Register for English 851 if you prefer to emphasize theory; register for Art 511 if you prefer to emphasize practice. The groups will meet together and will share readings and exercises. It is possible to take both courses concurrently.

Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson and co-founders and sustaining directors of the collaborative entity Spatula&Barcode, which creates art events devoted to conviviality, commensality, and criticality. Both are professors in the Art Department. Peterson is also program director for Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies.

ART HISTORY

Art History 867/Environ Studies 922: Historical and Cultural Methods in Environmental Research.
Professor Anna Andrzejewski
avandrzejews@wisc.edu
Tuesdays, 4:00 – 6:30pm (online synchronous)

Designed as a broad overview of key methods and interpretive approaches for understanding past environmental change as it relates to human culture and history, the seminar is a great way to get to know faculty and grad students from across campus who are broadly interested in environmental history and the contributions of the environmental humanities to environmental studies and the environmental sciences.

special announcement about an undergraduate course in visual cultures:

Art History 103: Introduction to Visual Cultures
Professor Jill Casid
jhcasid@wisc.edu
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00 AM – 11:50 AM

How do we look? How to see the world? We are in the midst of a planetary visual revolution. It is also not the first. We live our lives largely on screens both big and small. And our experiences are increasingly mediated by the tsunami of images we take, share and consume. Whether seen as troubling or exciting, the world we live in is visual dominant. And this transformation makes it imperative to reckon with what images do. Confronting how images shape us and the world we live in is imperative to the major issues of our time from how we address climate change to structural racism, from how we face an invisible virus to whether and how we can imagine a future on earth. This course tracks the world-making powers of images and imaging from selfies to satellites and maps to memes. Confronting how power works through the visual from surveillance to profiling, we explore historical and emergent forms of visual activism that seize the potential in looking back but also ways of resisting compulsory visualization. Asking whether and how dominant images represent an “us,  we trouble the common sense determinations made of the body in making not just race, sex, gender and ability but also character and even a claim on a livable life something we imagine we can read on the surface of the imaged body and its interior. But we will also question the ethics of an assumed right to look and question the settler colonial order of things in the claimed right to take an image. In asking these ethical and political questions about what images do, we must now also confront the lives of the images. Now that it is possible to produce living images made of the biological matter of life, images can no longer be dismissed as mere second-order representations or simulations of life. And this puts a different twist on our confrontation with the ways that images don’t just represent but may be said to do us.

There are no pre-requisites and no background in art or its history assumed or required!

COMMUNICATION ARTS

Com Arts 460 / Italian 460: Italian Cinema
Professor Patrick Rumble
parumble@wisc.edu
Online/Synchronous.  MW 11 – 11:50pm (+discussion section)
Can be taken for graduate credit

This course offers a survey of the history of Italian cinema from the Second World War up to today, examining the work of key filmmakers in the Italian art cinema tradition, including Rossellini, De Sica, Antonioni, Pasolini, Cavani, Bertolucci, Fellini, Moretti, Marazzi, and Gioli. Students will be introduced to important film movements and trends including Futurism, Neorealism, the Commedia all’italiana, Auteurist/Italian New Wave cinema, Feminist filmmaking, Avant-Garde film and Environmental cinema.

Com Arts 613: Mediated South Asia: Film, Media and Public Cultures
Professor Darshana Mini
dmini@wisc.edu
Synchronous Lecture / Tuesdays 2:30 – 5:00pm

This course is an attempt to problematize the regional marker of “South Asia” as it is manifests itself in film and media emerging from, as well as responding to the South Asian community. Approaching “South Asia” as a postcolonial category, we will examine how the use of geopolitical labels can essentialize, but also sometimes lend cohesion to culturally, politically, and linguistically distinct entities in their own ways. Even though South Asia comprises of countries such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives, there is a predominance of the Indian sub-continent in imaginations of the history of the region. Such processes condition expectations of cultural uniformity across the region. Moreover, the tendency to center Bollywood as South Asian Cinema points towards the hegemony of the Indian nation-state in the South Asian region. Often, this leads to the erasure of diverse experiences, cultures and dissent that marks the landscape of South Asia. In this course, we will cover both regional films produced in India (not necessarily Bollywood), as well as films from Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bhutan, Urdu films from Pakistan, Afghan films, among others. We will locate how ethnic conflicts, gender non-conformity, caste, settler colonialism, alternative cinematic practices and migrant films manifest themselves in South Asian cinemas. Rather than locate the films through the lens of the nation-state and national cinema framework, this course pushes us to think about the role of media in forging cultural formations that actively contest state formations and national identities that are premised on sovereignty. The cultural artifacts that we will encounter in this course bypass the formal regimes of media production and instead, steer us to look at the peripheral, creative and alternative ways of making and distributing media. Thematically, the course covers varied iterations creative expression and dissent as they cross paths with censorship, separatism, linguistic nationalism and identity politics. We will be using the lens of “public cultures” to tease out the different ways public spheres mediate, contest and complicate the representational matrices used to understand nationalism, cultural debates and gender. The course is divided into five modules—Postcolonial Nation-building, Caste, Diaspora, Desire and Populism. Exploring media content including feature and experimental films (BombayHaiderFire), art works, performances (Imphal Talksies) advertisements, digital content (political campaign material), short films and documentaries (Two Flags), this course will unpack how nationalist strains take new forms in the populist mobilizations and the role of film and media in capturing these tense relations. This syllabus is an evolving archive of our contemporary moment in which we are faced with ethno-nationalist resurgences around the world, and interrogates how ethnicity, identity markers and political mobilization generate an array of factors that brush against, contest and complicate heteronormative renderings of identity. In doing so, this course will offer the students an opportunity to understand global media cultures by locating the infrastructures, modes of production and historical mapping of the media produced in South Asia.

Com Arts 613: Special Effects Before Cinema: Technology, Magic, Illusion
Instructor: Amanda Shubert, Associate Lecturer
ashubert@wisc.edu
Class time: T/Th 1-2:15pm
Modality: TBD but I am planning for and assuming synchronous online

This course introduces you to pre-cinematic media in nineteenth-century culture. We know that cinema was invented at the turn of the twentieth century with the work of pioneers like the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès. But what kinds of optical gadgets, visual entertainments, and modes of spectatorship paved the way for cinema’s emergence? We will answer this question by diving deep into pre-cinematic media culture in its many manifestations, including moving picture toys, technological ghosts, magic shows, and 3D photography. Using digital archives, we will explore the visual techniques of these devices and spectacles, asking how nineteenth-century spectators experienced them and how they influenced film aesthetics and spectatorship. We will also turn to critical and theoretical work on imperialism, race, class, and visual culture that will shed light on the complex and shifting ideological work performed by nineteenth-century optical media. As part of the course you will be asked to conduct your own original research on a pre-cinematic media object of your choice.

ENGLISH

English 851 / Art 511: Performance Art/Performance Studies
Team taught by Professor Laurie Beth Clark and Professor Michael Peterson
clarkandpeterson@gmail.com
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 5:00 – 7:30 PM (online synchronous)

Next semester offers a rare opportunity to participate in a team taught course by Professors Michael Peterson and Laurie Beth Clark. The interdisciplinary class will explore contemporary concepts and methods in both making and studying Performance. It is most suitable for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

Performance Art (also known as “Live Art” or simply “Performance”) has become established as a powerful means of expressing the self, exploring philosophical truths, and taking political action. Performance Studies has grown into a rigorously interdisciplinary field that uses the concept of performance to study a wide range of subjects, from political activism to professional wrestling to the performing arts–including Performance Art.

Stimulating practical assignments will allow students to investigate durational, theatrical, spatial, and relational approaches to performance making. Provocative weekly readings by significant scholars will expose students to diverse established and emerging theoretical perspectives.

We will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5 to 730 PM in a hybrid synchronous format, with options, if needed, for fully online (contingent on evolving pandemic circumstances). In practice, this will mean that we have our discussions on Zoom but may realize some art works in socially-distanced live formats.

Register for English 851 if you prefer to emphasize theory; register for Art 511 if you prefer to emphasize practice. The groups will meet together and will share readings and exercises. It is possible to take both courses concurrently.

Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson and co-founders and sustaining directors of the collaborative entity Spatula&Barcode, which creates art events devoted to conviviality, commensality, and criticality. Both are professors in the Art Department. Peterson is also program director for Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies.

English 859: Gender, Class and Nationalism in Irish Theatre and Performance
Instructor: Mary Trotter, Assoc. Prof. English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies (she/her)
Online/Synchronous: Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30 – 10:45

This class explores how such factors as cultural nationalism, violence, religion, postcolonialism, and economic busts and booms have shaped the expression of gender and sexuality in Irish theatre and performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We are focusing on Ireland in order to make a very close study of a specific national and cultural milieu, but we will also be thinking about how Irish theatre and performance is in conversation with other national, social and cultural movements.

In the first section of the class we will focus on the nationalist Gaelic Revival’s relationship to class struggle amid changing notions of masculinity and femininity. We will examine both dramatic texts and moments of performance in which nationalism, feminism and class reform intersect in ways that reflect both the collaborations and conflicts among these three movements. These will include theatre riots, anti-imperialist demonstrations, suffrage pageants and written and performed recounts of the Irish Rebellion, War for Independence and Civil War.

In section two, we’ll consider mid-century expressions of gender, nation and class in mid-century Ireland, noting the rise of civil rights movements in the North and the quashing of women’s rights in the Republic. We will examine how theatre and performance responded to these and other issues, considering both performance that upheld conservative social beliefs, such as the An Tóstal festivals in the 1950s; and those that disrupted such beliefs, such as the 1930s Dublin Cabaret and Gate Theatre productions, and the mid-century socialist dramas of Sean O’Casey.

In section three, we will see how later theatre and performance of the late 20th and early 21st centuries challenged the conservative tropes of previous decades, with an exploration of plays and performances that addressed the relationship between nationalism and class; and the rise of dramas and performances that challenged the legacies of sexism, homophobia and xenophobia in Irish society and culture.

This is a theatre history seminar, so we will center our work on how theatre and performance was in conversation with specific historical events. But we will also bring insights from cultural, critical and performance theory to our work.

For more information, please contact me at mtrotter@wisc.edu.  Let’s talk!

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Environ Studies 922/Art History 867: Historical and Cultural Methods in Environmental Research.
Professor Anna Andrzejewski
avandrzejews@wisc.edu
Tuesdays, 4:00 – 6:30 (online synchronous)

Designed as a broad overview of key methods and interpretive approaches for understanding past environmental change as it relates to human culture and history, the seminar is a great way to get to know faculty and grad students from across campus who are broadly interested in environmental history and the contributions of the environmental humanities to environmental studies and the environmental sciences.

HISTORY

History 710: Designing Courses
Professor Lee Wandel
lpwandel@wisc.edu
Tuesdays 1:20 – 3:15pm

This is a workshop in designing courses: thematic and chronological, lectures and seminars, for all levels of students.  Each participant will design one course of their choosing, to be taught in-person, blended, or fully online from a platform we shall be discussing. In our weekly meetings, we begin with the changing landscape of course design itself, the need to design courses that can be changed at any point in a given semester.  We shall also be talking about conceptualizing the whole, the parts, and how one builds connections over a single term of study. In our discussion of lecture courses, we shall consider the architecture of each lecture as it fits into the larger architecture of the course, as well as how to build into each lecture differing levels and kinds of access for a diverse student body. In our discussion of building a seminar, we shall explore various ways of bringing students into weekly conversations – how to build into the structure of the course student engagement with the material. For all courses, we shall be exploring ways of fostering student participation in what may well be a virtual classroom.

The credit standard for this course is met by an expectation of a total of 135 hours of engagement with the course’s learning activities (at least 45 hours per credit or 9 hours per week), which include regularly scheduled meeting times (group seminar meetings of 115 minutes per week), dedicated online time, reading, writing, field trips, individual consultations with the instructor, and other student work as described in the syllabus.

By the end of the semester, each member will be required to have developed—conceptualized, articulated goals, structured pedagogical steps of learning to meet those goals, determined assignments that support those goals, and established a scale for measuring student progress—one course. We shall also be developing a variety of ideas for world history courses that might be implemented in different teaching situations.

ITALIAN

Italian 460 / Com Arts 460: Italian Cinema
Professor Patrick Rumble
parumble@wisc.edu
Online/Synchronous.  MW 11 – 11:50pm (+discussion section)
Can be taken for graduate credit

This course offers a survey of the history of Italian cinema from the Second World War up to today, examining the work of key filmmakers in the Italian art cinema tradition, including Rossellini, De Sica, Antonioni, Pasolini, Cavani, Bertolucci, Fellini, Moretti, Marazzi, and Gioli. Students will be introduced to important film movements and trends including Futurism, Neorealism, the Commedia all’italiana, Auteurist/Italian New Wave cinema, Feminist filmmaking, Avant-Garde film and Environmental cinema.

Italian 952: “Seminar: Pier Paolo Pasolini”
Professor Patrick Rumble
parumble@wisc.edu
Wednesdays 4:30 – 6:30pm (online synchronous)

This graduate seminar will focus on the cinematic, literary, and theoretical contributions of controversial Italian filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975).  Open to graduate students only.

SPANISH

Spanish 802: Performing Activism: Theatre, Protest, and Politics
Professor Paola Hernández
pshernandez@wisc.edu
Wednesdays 3:30-5:30pm
*The course will be taught in Spanish

As Augusto Boal has stated, the theatre can be a political tool to encourage the “spect-actor” to be part of a movement or an experience. This course will study the impact of political theatrical and performance works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in different countries in Latin America as well as Latinx in the U.S. We will focus on a variety of manifestations of how theatre and performance propel types of cultural and political activism, engage and stimulate the audience, and encourage us to think of the “process” of creation, movement, and involvement. Different theoretical frameworks (political theatre, scenarios, performance constellations, theater of the real, postdramatic theatre, participatory performance) will allow us to focus on both traditional political theater and digital networks of protest (the theatre of the oppressed, teatro campesino, teatro abierto, teatroxlaidentidad, #YoSoy132, NiUnaMenos, NiUnaMas, Lastesis, Expresión Mole, Los Dream 9). We will also explore how theatre, performance and visual artists respond to repressive governments, identity and gender politics in symbolic ways, as seen in the work of Griselda Gambaro, Federico León, Lola Arias, Mariano Pensotti, Guillermo Calderón, Manuela Infante, Mariana de Althaus, Regina José Galindo, El Ciervo Encantado, Violeta Luna, Guillermo Gómez Peña, and Xandra Ibarra.

Fall 2020

Fall 2020

Required CVC Course for the Certificate and Minor

Art History / Afro-American Studies 801: Historiography, Theory and Methods in Visual Culture
Professor Jill Casid
Mondays 6:00 – 8:30 PM
Location: Conrad A. Elvehjem Building L170

This seminar is the core requirement for the graduate minor in the transdisciplinary study of visual cultures. The seminar charts the formation and history of the dynamic, multi- stranded, and still changing field. It seeks to build a practice-based knowledge of the theories and methods important to the field’s formation as well as those driving the field’s future.

Potential Visual Cultures Electives

Art

Art 908, Section 001: Sustainability and Resilience and/in the Arts
Professor Laurie Beth Clark
M 5:00 – 8:00 PM
Location: Art Lofts 1274

In the light of the 2020 pandemic, there is an increased urgency to consider how human beings foster resilience and cope with uncertain futures.  Through readings and projects, this course will explore the ways that artists engage with ecological issues, social precarity, and other planetary vulnerabilities.  We will look at the work being created in multiple arts media that explores environmental themes and/or participates in resilient practices. We will consider the ways that artists collaborate with one another and with scientists and social scientists to propose pragmatic responses to biopolitical crises, as well as the ways that individual projects that may be less practical or more poetic can still contribute to social change. A further consideration of the course is the sustainability of arts and critical practices in and of themselves, from healthy materials to healthy relationships and healthy institutions: How do we devise ways of working and being that we can sustain across a lifetime?

Art History

Art History 415 / 715: Image and Text in Medieval Manuscripts

Professor Thomas Dale
MW 2:30 – 3:45 PM
Location: Conrad A. Elvehjem Building L150

One of the most significant technological innovations in late antiquity was the invention of the parchment manuscript (hand-written book) as principal vehicle for the dissemination of written word and the visualization of knowledge. This course offers an introduction to the art of medieval manuscript illumination from ca. 400 to 1500. We discuss such celebrated manuscripts as the Book of Kells (c. 800) and the Très Riches Heures of Jean Duc de Berry (ca. 1400). Students will be introduced to essential tools for identifying and interpreting manuscript illuminations and their texts, drawing on original examples in the collection of the Chazen Museum of Art, UW Special Collections, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. Particular emphasis will be placed on the relationship between images and texts, and the ways in which the figural and ornamental decoration contribute to the meaning and function of the manuscript within specific theological, liturgical, devotional, institutional and ideological contexts.  We will touch on a wide range of topics, including monsters and marginalia, bestiaries and books of natural history, books of hours and lay devotion, the macabre, mappaemundi (world maps) and scientific diagrams, romance literature and luxury liturgical books made for prelates and emperors. We will also explore the material, phenomenological and performative aspects of medieval books. We will also create an exhibition of medieval manuscripts depicting Jerusalem (in facsimile) for the Kohler Art Library to complement the Medieval Studies thematic programming on Jerusalem in the Medieval and Modern Imagination. One class per week will be devoted to lectures; the second class to discussion.  Evaluation will be based on class participation, catalogue entries, and a research paper.

Art History 800 / 500 / DS 642: Taste
Professor Preeti Chopra
M 2:30 – 5:00 PM
Location: Conrad A. Elvehjem Building L166

This seminar will explore the idea of taste – both “good” and bad”, in “popular” and “high” culture – drawing on materials from diverse parts of the globe.  We will read both historical and theoretical works on the idea of taste, and examine works that could include architecture, landscape, art, articles of clothing and public space.  The readings will be drawn from a wide range of disciplines including architectural history, art history, anthropology, sociology, and material culture.

Art History 815: Medieval Monsters
Professor Thomas Dale
W 4:00 – 6:30 PM
Location: Conrad A. Elvehjem Building L166

Dragons, unicorns, dog-heads, werewolves, hell-mouths, and one-eyed giants are among the many monsters which populate the medieval and neo-medieval imagination.  They evoke simultaneously wonder, delight, horror and fear with their manifold hybrid combinations of species and bodily distortions. This seminar explores the origins and distinctive meanings and functions of monsters in medieval art and culture.  It is premised on the concept of the monster as product of the imagination that elicits thought about the human condition and the blurred boundaries between the animal and the human, a necessary corollary to humanity.  The term “monster” derives from the Latin word ‘monstrare”—to show or demonstrate—and since the early Middle Ages, monsters have been understood in European culture as manifesting through outward bodily form spiritual deformity or sin, supernatural or diabolical beings, the foreign or the other, and the unknown.  We will be looking at the intersection of natural history writing and images, religion and theology, politics and race.  The visual images are the primary sources we are focused on, but we will also introduce important literary texts and historical sources, and we will read broadly across the disciplines of Medieval Studies.  We will look at beasts and monsters in illuminated bestiaries, at caricature and physiognomic deformity, at monsters in monastic cloisters, at monsters, gender and sexuality, at the Plinian “monstrous races” and Wonders of the east, at monsters on maps, at the extension of monsters to the New World in the Age of Exploration, at “grotesques” and artistic invention, and finally at the revival of monsters in Neo-medieval imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from the gargoyles of Notre-Dame to the orcs of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.  Evaluation will be based on regular participation in class discussion, an annotated bibliography, two oral presentations on a research paper, and a final research paper.

English

EL 833: Media Theory, Literary Studies
Professor Sarah Ann Wells

This graduate seminar analyzes major debates and terms of media theory over the long 20th century. “A medium is a medium is a medium”: what exactly does Friedrich Kittler have in mind with this famous tautology? We will read approaches to the concept of medium — including medium specificity, material metaphor, intermediality, prosthesis, camera reality, and adaptation — by Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, Mary Ann Doane, Siegfried Zielinski, Niklas Luhman, Haroldo de Campos, Kaja Silverman, Gilles Deleuze, N. Katherine Hayles, Eduardo Cadava, Robert Stam, and more. We will also be reading a few works of literature. Media theory provides an entry point to defamiliarize literary studies and query its premises, but we will also consider the inverse: the extent to which literary studies might afford specific operations and concepts to finetune or trouble media theory.

In this context, modernism offers a specific inflection point, for reasons both historical and disciplinary — media theory has rapidly transformed the field of modernist studies over the last decade. Students working in other periods are encouraged to bring the specific histories of the media ecologies and materialities they study (e.g., stone, broadside, codex, computer screen) to the table. A final overarching goal is to consider how practical criticism — the stuff of our conference presentations, seminar papers, and publications — mediates between media theory and literary studies. Course requirements: a research paper, a book review, and frequent and active course participation/discussion-leading.

English 859: Documenting Lives Through Theatre and Performance: A 20th-21st Centuries Study of the Americas
Professor Paola Hernández
Tuesdays: 3:30 – 6:30 PM
Location: Education L177

In this practice-based course students will learn the historical and theoretical foundations of documentary theatre and performance. We will investigate how the performing arts as ephemeral cultural forms are used to revisit history, to offer multiple explanations of an event, or to confront different versions of truth. Through different case studies from the Americas, this course will focus on how material objects and archives—photographs, videos, and documents such as witness reports, legal briefs, and letters—come to life in a new type of documentary theatre. The course will explore the dimension of an object’s meaning, how it can be expanded and reinterpreted on stage, and how onstage interpretations of physical objects help to generate an affective relationship between actor and the audience. Ultimately, students will study a range of interpretations of how documentary theater can not only help conceptualize the idea of self in today’s society, but also proclaim a new mode of testimony through theatrical and embodied practices.

Italian 452: Italian American Cinema
Professor Patrick Rumble
TR 1:00 – 2:15 PM
Location: Van Hise Hall 494

A survey of Italian American Film and Television, from the Early Cinema to the present. Films and TV programs engaging with the Italian American Experience will be studied within the cultural, historical, literary and ethnic contexts of North America. Screenings will include The Godfather, Goodfellas, Household Saints, Do the Right Thing, The Sopranos, and others. Taught in English. Open to all students.

Portuguese

Portuguese 642: Topics in Luso-Brazilian Culture: Portuguese Visual Cultures, 1880-present
Professor Ellen Sapega
TR 2:30PM – 3:45PM

In this course, we will examine various aspects of Portuguese visual culture from the late nineteenth century to the revolution of 1974 and its aftermath. The course content will be divided in to units that include: commemoration and public art, cinema, advertising, photography, caricature, political posters, radio and television, and folklore.Theoretical readings will include essays by W. T. J. Mitchell, John Berger, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Tony Bennett and Marita Sturken. Students will write two short papers (3-4 pages) and will develop a longer final project. They will also be required to organize several oral presentations throughout the semester. The class will be taught in Portuguese.

Theatre and Drama

Theatre 731: Advanced Theatre History – 500 BCE-1700
Professor Mary Trotter
TR 9:30AM – 10:45AM
Location: EDUCATION L177

In this course we will take a fast-paced journey through about 2500 years of (mostly) western dramatic literature and theatre practice.  Each week we will explore a different tradition of theatre practice through historical and critical readings and read at least one dramatic text.  By taking this course you will 1) gain a foundational understanding of how theatre was written, performed and received in several major historical periods; 2)read significant dramas from diverse periods, nations and genres; 3)gain exposure to different modes of theatre historiography, criticism and theory through reading and discussion of secondary texts.

No previous knowledge of theatre history is required to take this course, but both novices and old pros of theatre studies will have an opportunity to gain a richer understanding of how drama, theatre and performance functioned within the art, politics and culture of particular communities, and how their innovations, prejudices, discoveries and traditions continue to shape how we think about theatre, performance and the world today.

Theatre traditions we will explore include:  Classical Greek Theatre, Classical Indian Theatre, Roman Comedy, Noh Theatre, Medieval Theatre, Early Modern English Drama, Golden Age Spanish Theatre, Commedia dell ‘Arte, Early Opera, French neoclassicism, and theatre of the English Restoration.

Spring 2020

Spring 2020

Required CVC Course for the Certificate and Minor

Art History / Afro-American Studies 801: Historiography, Theory and Methods in Visual Culture
Professor Laurie Beth Clark
TR, 5:00 – 7:00 PM, Art Lofts 1274

This seminar is the core requirement for the graduate minor in the transdisciplinary study of visual cultures. The seminar charts the formation and history of the dynamic, multi- stranded, and still changing field. It seeks to build a practice-based knowledge of the theories and methods important to the field’s formation as well as those driving the field’s future.

Potential Visual Cultures Electives

ART

ART 908: Artists as Curators/Curators as Artists
Professor Laurie Beth Clark
Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:45 to 4:15, Art Lofts 1274

This is a course for anyone interested in curating as a creative practice. This is a studio class with curatorial projects as assignments but there will be substantial reading exploring a range of perspectives within contemporary curatorial activity. The course will be useful to students of theory and history who are considering curatorial careers but it will have a special focus on artists as curators.

More and more artists have multiple identities as critics, curators, and makers. Artists curate their own work for solo exhibitions and they curate their friends’ work for group shows. Artists may curate shows of their peers as a way of building a creative community, thereby providing logical contexts for their work. Artists serve in curatorial roles in biennials and festivals. Artists are sometimes invited to play with collections (e.g. Fred Wilson and Sophie Calle). And artists use curation as an artmaking strategy, building works from collections of objects. Increasingly, there are practices of virtual curation, where art works are assembled conceptually as lectures or electronic galleries.

Successful curation involves insight, persistence, and judgment. For a show to realize its curatorial intentions, judicious selection, meticulous research, public and often private persuasion, as well as dynamic installation strategies all come into play. The class will consider these pragmatic aspects of curating alongside an array of theoretical issues.

ART HISTORY

Art History 305: Islamic Art and Architecture
*can be taken for graduate credit
Professor Jennifer Pruitt
MWF 12:05-12:55, Elvehjem L140

This course surveys the architecture, landscape, book arts, and luxury objects produced in Islamic contexts from Spain to India from the 7th through the 21st centuries. Attention will be focused upon the relationships between Islamic visual idioms and localized religious, political, and socioeconomic circumstances. In particular, lectures and readings will examine the vital roles played by theology, royal patronage, ceremonies, gift exchange, trade, and workshop practices in the formulation of visual traditions.

Art History 500/800: Art and Architecture in the Arabian Gulf
Professor Jennifer Pruitt
Wednesdays, 4:00-6:30 PM, Elvehjem L170

This course will explore issues in modern and contemporary architecture in the Arabian Gulf. Beginning with issues in cultural heritage and destruction in Saudi Arabia and culminating in the explosion of “starchitect” (star architect) projects in the United Arab Emirates, the course will explore the role of local identity in the creation of global, contemporary architecture. Among the themes we will explore: the role of universal human rights in contemporary architecture; connections between the Gulf and east/south Asia; connections between the Gulf and the West; architecture as politics; the role of museums and universities as controversial forms of architectural diplomacy; innovations in urbanism and environmental planning.

Art History 601: Intro to Museum Studies
Professor Anna Andrzejewski
T 4:00 – 6:30 PM, Elvehjem L170

This class is an immersion, methods-based course in which the class works together to plan an exhibition in the Chazen Museum of Art. The exhibition will address the history of the Elvehjem Building in its campus context over the past 50 years. We will work in the University Archives and the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives to learn about this history. We will also discuss how to tell a compelling story through curating this show, and work as a team on elements of the exhibition. Although the exhibition will not be mounted until the following fall, student work will form part of the show, and they will be given credit for it.

ASIAN

ASIAN 300: Evangelion
*can be taken for graduate credit
Professor Steven Ridgely
TR, 9:30 – 10:45 AM, Van Hise Hall 594

ASIAN 833: Visual Culture of Early Modern Japan
Professor Adam Kern
TR 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM, Van Hise Hall 495

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

CL 466: Surrealism 2.0
*can be taken for graduate credit
Professor Sarah Wells
TR 4:00 – 5:00 PM, Sterling Hall 1323

Comparative critical study of the theoretical and practical interactions of literature with the arts (music, fine art, plastic arts); with visual, material, or digital cultures; with the media – with attention to cross-cultural, transnational and historical perspectives.

ENGLISH

Engl 859: Topics in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies. Seminar in Postdramatic Theatre.
Professor Mike Vanden Heuvel
Tuesdays 3:00 – 6:00 PM, HUM 2261

Since the historical avant-garde, experimental theatre has pointedly shifted away from traditional, text­based drama using aims and strategies that Hans­Thies Lehmann collectively terms “postdramatic.” As well as challenging the primacy of the written script, these performances explore, among other things, more dynamically visual scenographies, nonlinear structures, the “death of character,” new dramaturgical models, the impact of intermediality on live performance, new relations between performance and audience —all with profound consequences for notions of dramatic writing, theatrical presence, the role of the performer, and the experience of the spectator. Issues of postdramatic design, acting and directing will also be featured, and number of theoretical perspectives—on issues related to space, duration, perception, the subject and the body—will ground our investigations.

Representative artists whose work will be examined may include (Germany/Austria): Peter Handke; Heiner Müller; René Pollesch; Falk Richter; Elfriede Jelinek; (Flanders) Jan Fabre & Troubleyn Company; Reckless Sleepers; (U.K.) Martin Crimp; Sarah Kane, Gob Squad; Forced Entertainment; Complicite; Blast Theory; (France) Francois Peyret; (Italy) Luca Ronconi, Sociétas Raffaello Sanzio; (U.S.) the Wooster Group; The Builder’s Association; Elevator Repair Service; among others.

The course investigates current tendencies in theorizing performance through practice. We begin with Lehmann’s text (first published in 1999 and translated into English in 2006) as a starting point for discussion of a range of issues that his formulation of the postdramatic bring into play: the politics of representation and spectatorship, the nature of vision, the relations between live and mediated experience. As well as developing critical vocabularies for responding to such work (written scores and videos of productions) and conducting advanced theoretical reading and research, students will be familiarized with the critical, artistic and institutional contexts that give rise to, and often contest, the postdramatic.

Student research is conducted through dramaturgical practice, in­class presentations on topical material, media design projects, and a final research project that combines research, critical writing, dramaturgy and/or performance. Students will also lead a discussion and workshop.

GERMAN

German 804/948: Culture in 20th Century Berlin
Cross-listed with FR, HIS, PSCI, SOC 804
Professor Pamela Potter
Tuesdays, 4:00 – 6:30 PM

Prerequisites: Graduate standing.
Language of instruction: English.

Starting as a drab garrison city in a landscape devoid of natural beauty, Berlin’s growth as a political and industrial center came in fits and starts with little regard for systematic urban planning, but somehow it grew to become one of the most vibrant cultural centers in Europe if not the world. Yet from the time that it became the capital of the Prussian kingdom, a succession of rulers found it difficult to embrace this city as a site worthy of cultural patronage: even as the rulers of Prussia and later the German empire invested in their capital city’s cultural portfolio by commissioning museums and universities, such advances were overshadowed by its rapid commercial and industrial expansion, its working class activism, and the proliferation of sex tourism and popular entertainment in operetta houses, cabarets, and amusement parks amidst the disorientating maelstrom of an urban space.

World wars and regime changes posed even more setbacks for Berlin in achieving a high cultural profile. In a highly symbolic move following the First World War, the new democratic republic was named not after its capital but after Weimar, a city with a more respectable cultural pedigree. Even Nazi leaders disdained Berlin for what they regarded as its degenerate “asphalt culture.” With massive destruction by Allied bombs and its eventual dissection into East and West Berlin, the project of rebuilding its cultural renown in the impoverished East and the geographically insulated West seemed impossible to achieve. Despite all these odds, Berlin culture has managed to maintain a world-class reputation as a center for artistic achievement and a mecca for alternative culture.

In the twentieth century, Berlin has functioned as the seat of government and as a showcase for conflicting ideologies during the Cold War, and it now faces the challenge of returning to its function as reunified Germany’s capital without ignoring its past. This course will examine the arts, literature, and entertainment in Berlin from the turn of the century through the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Cold War, and the reunification, in an effort to determine how politics, economics, ideology, and demographics have come together to shape a unique culture that has been able
to withstand a perpetual cycle of construction, destruction, and renewal.

Course requirements:
attendance and participation in weekly discussions
book review (written and oral presentation)
film review (written and oral presentation)
oral presentation on individual research project and final research paper

Fall 2019

Potential Visual Cultures Electives

Fall 2019

 

ART

ART 470: Arts for Social Change
Laurie Beth Clark
Fridays 9:00 AM-4:00 PM

Whether poetic or didactic, the arts have a role in helping us to imagine and realize a better world. This course explores the history, theory, and practice of socially engaged projects across all the arts. Through readings and the production of creative works, we will explore the numerous ways in which arts can align with social justice through critical representations, prefigurative politics, collaborative devising, and activist curation.

Art 908: Critique and Criticism
Laurie Beth Clark
Thursdays 5:00 PM-8:00 PM

The practice of criticism is undergoing substantial changes, driven by two consecutive “democratizations”, the first (beginning in the sixties) with the opening up of a wide range of ostensibly incommensurate art practices and the second (beginning in the nineties) with the popularity of internet forums for writing about art. The class will explore a range of strategies for providing and eliciting  critical feedback on your own work and that or other artists/students.

ART HISTORY

Art History 703: Curatorial Studies Colloquium
Henry Drewal
M 4:00 PM-6:00 PM

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to a broad range of questions, both theoretical and practical, related to curatorial practice. The core of the course is a series of sessions on curatorial strategies. Particular emphasis will be placed on integrative and collaborative approaches to curating a wide variety of material: art, film, music, books, anthropology/culture, archeology, history, geology, zoology, dance, etc. With this ideal in mind, we will bring in a series of experts to engage with each other and with the class on the theories, objectives, and processes of conceiving, designing, and mounting exhibitions, as well as reaching different audiences with both physical and virtual exhibitions. Students will also be introduced to the distinctive collections and resources on campus and in the region.

Art History 715: Icons, Religion, and Empire: Early Christian and Byzantine Art (Art 200-1453)
Thomas Dale
MW 2:30 PM-3:45 PM

Why did early Christians consider art necessary, if potentially dangerous? How did they adapt and compete with Roman and Jewish traditions? How were the visual propaganda and monumental architecture of the Roman Empire transformed during a millennium of Byzantine (East Roman) rule? These are key questions addressed as we explore the role of architecture and images in religion and imperial politics of the Mediterranean basin between the 3rd and 15th centuries. Other broader topics include the cult of the saints; theories and functions of icons and iconoclasm in Orthodox Christianity;text and image in illuminated manuscripts; multi-sensory aspects of sacred space and ritual; & Byzantium’s role in global cultural exchange; and depictions of race and alterity.

Art History 775: Arts of Japan
Gene Phillips
MWF 11:00 AM-11:50 AM

A survey of Japanese art, including painting, sculpture, architecture, woodblock prints and various crafts.

Art History 779: Great Cities of Islam
Jennifer Pruitt
TR 1:00 PM-2:15 PM

This course offers a comparative study of the foundation and development of five great cities in the history of Islam: Cairo, Istanbul, Delhi, Mecca, and Isfahan. Architectural projects, ornamental idioms, and changes to the urban plan are studied from aesthetic and cultural perspectives. Integrating historical and religious studies, this course highlights the shifting nature of Islamic culture, from the tenth century CE to the present.

ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES:
 
Asian 763: Studies in Japanese Literature: Kibyôshi
Adam Kern
TR 11:00 AM-12:15 PM

Asian 376/LitTrans 231: Manga
Adam Kern
TR 1:00 PM-2:15 PM

Surveys the manga (Japanese comicbook) from its precursors in premodern woodblock-printed booklets to its contemporary manifestations in subgenres like shonen, gekiga, mecha, and shojo. Draws upon critical writings on visual culture, literature, and visual-verbal narrative.

ENGLISH

English 812: Harlem Renaissance and Afro-Modernism

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
R 9:30 AM-12:00 PM

GENDER AND WOMEN’S STUDIES

GWS 340 (Grad level meets with): Contemporary Queer Art & Visual Culture
Anna Campbell
TR 1:00 PM-2:15 PM

Topics in feminist study of LGBTQ sexualities, considering race, nationality, and time.

Spring 2019

Graduate CVC Courses for Spring 2019

Art History 706: History of American Art: 1607-Present
Anna Andrzejewski, MWF 11-11:50 AM

This graduate-level course typically meets with an intermediate to advanced level lecture course. However, the requirements for graduate students are different, consisting of journal entries, presentations, and a substantial research paper as well as attendance and participation in the lectures.

Art History 779: Visual Cultures of South Asia
(cross listed with Languages and Cultures of Asia).
Preeti Chopra, MW 2:30-3:45 PM; meets with undergrad class: 428

This lecture course concentrates on the images (art, advertisements, photography, television, and cinema), material culture (such as, clothing), and environments (architecture, urban planning, and public rituals) of India.

During the semester, we will examine South Asian visual cultures from the ancient to the modern periods. This historical trajectory will be complemented by a critical focus on selected thematic issues. During these moments we will compare and contrast cases studies from across India, spatially and temporally. These historical ruptures, or time travels, will allow us to see the continuities and discontinuities between the past and present. Thematic issues and ideas that will be examined in this class include sexuality, the representation of women, patronage, cultural encounter and cultural synthesis, iconoclasm, the relationship between landscape and architecture, rethinking the canon, ways of seeing, art and craft, the sacred and secular, colonialism, modernism, nationalism, and the pleasures of Indian cinema. No prior knowledge of India is necessary.

Art History 800: The State and Contemporary Art History
Jessica Cooley, TR 4:30-6:30 PM; meets with undergrad class AH 500

Art History 800: From Mecca to Dubai: Current Issues in the Architecture of the Arabian Gulf.
Jennifer Pruitt, W 4:30-6:30 PM; meets with undergrad class AH 500

This graduate (and advanced undergraduate) seminar will center on how the state appears in contemporary art, both representationally and institutionally. However, instead of considering the state to be only a political unit, this course will also consider the state as a more general term indicating a condition of being. This double definition of state, as authoritative and affective, will guide us to ask who or what is made visible in contemporary art and who or what remains stateless.

Art History 801: Historiography, Theory and Methods in Visual Culture
Preeti Chopra, Mondays 4:30-6:30 PM.

This seminar is the core requirement for the graduate minor in the transdisciplinary study of visual cultures. The seminar charts the formation and history of the dynamic, multi- stranded, and still changing field. It seeks to build a practice-based knowledge of the theories and methods important to the field’s formation as well as those driving the field’s future.

Art History 815: The Body and the Senses in Medieval Art
Thomas Dale, Wed, 4:00-6:00 PM; meets with undergrad class AH 515

In medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire, visual images and physical artifacts–their form and materials as well as their subject matter or iconography–were endowed with considerable power to affect the minds and behaviors of the spectator. Images and objects served, particularly in the realm of religion, to mediate the experience of the sacred, communicating between the invisible or the immaterial and the material world of the body and the senses. In the medieval imagination, images literally came alive, touching, speaking to, embracing the beholder; crucifixes bled, Marian images wept and lactated. Similarly in medieval rituals and para-liturgical dramas such as the Deposition of the Cross or the Officium Stellae, images physically moved and appeared to interact with the viewer.

In the wake of the “sensorial turn” in the humanities and increased scrutiny of the material aspects of images and their making, this seminar invites students to consider how medieval art affected medieval viewers and appealed to both the intellect and the emotions, in both sacred and secular contexts, considering the significance of materials, processes of making, formal qualities, modes and settings of display, ritual functions and performance. We will also examine contemporary theories of materiality and affect to assess the extent to which they can be applied to the medieval context.

Undergraduate CVC Courses for Spring 2019

Anthropology 430: Language and Culture
Falina Enriquez, TR 11-12:15

The relationship of language as a communication system to the culture transmitted by it. Principle problems in the interrelations of language and nonlinguistic human behavior.

Art History 305: Islamic Art and Architecture
Jennifer Pruitt, MW 2:45-3:30 PM.

This course surveys the architecture, landscape, book arts, and luxury objects produced in Islamic contexts from Spain to India from the 7th through the 21st centuries. Attention will be focused upon the relationships between Islamic visual idioms and localized religious political and socioeconomic circumstances. In particular, lectures and readings will examine the vital roles played by theology, royal patronage, ceremonies, gift exchange, trade, and workshop practices in the formulation of visual traditions.

Art History 318: European Medieval Art in the Age of Crusades, Pilgrimage and Global Trade, ca. 1000-1400 [Romanesque & Gothic Art]
Thomas Dale, TuTh, 11:00 AM-12:15 PM

This course explores art and architecture as the agents and reflections of significant social and religious change, globalization and trade, scientific and technological change that shaped an emergent European identity from the second half of the eleventh century to the beginning of the fifteenth century. Focusing principally on France, Northern Spain and Italy, we will consider such topics as the rebirth of monumental sculpture in relationship to the senses and religious experience, Romanesque architecture and pilgrimage, monsters and alterity, portraiture and the commemoration of the dead, female mysticism and devotional images, mappaemundi and cartography, technological innovation and visionary experience in the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, the world of nature in medieval scientific manuscripts, and the macabre arts of late medieval funerary culture. In addition, particular emphasis will be placed on the interaction of Western Europe with the cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean through trade, pilgrimage, conquest and crusade.

Art History 428: Visual Cultures of South Asia
(cross listed with Languages and Cultures of Asia).
Preeti Chopra, MW 2:30-3:45 PM; meets with graduate class AH 779

This lecture course concentrates on the images (art, advertisements, photography, television, and cinema), material culture (such as, clothing), and environments (architecture, urban planning, and public rituals) of India.

During the semester, we will examine South Asian visual cultures from the ancient to the modern periods. This historical trajectory will be complemented by a critical focus on selected thematic issues. During these moments we will compare and contrast cases studies from across India, spatially and temporally. These historical ruptures, or time travels, will allow us to see the continuities and discontinuities between the past and present. Thematic issues and ideas that will be examined in this class include sexuality, the representation of women, patronage, cultural encounter and cultural synthesis, iconoclasm, the relationship between landscape and architecture, rethinking the canon, ways of seeing, art and craft, the sacred and secular, colonialism, modernism, nationalism, and the pleasures of Indian cinema. No prior knowledge of India is necessary.

Art History 430: Topics in Visual Culture: Art and Architecture in the Fascist State
Anna Andrzejewski, MWF 1:20-2:10 PM

Introduces key issues, theories, and methods in visual cultures studies, emphasizing aspects that affect the practices of art history and providing a changing topical focus that addresses new research in this developing interdisciplinary area.

Art History 475: Japanese Ceramics and Allied Arts
Quitman E. Phillips, MW 4:00-5:15 PM

A history of Japanese ceramics and related topics such as Chinese and Korean ceramics and the tea ceremony. Emphasis placed on the technological, cultural, political, and economic, as well as aesthetic, dimentions of ceramic development.

Art History 500: The State and Contemporary Art History
Jessica Cooley, TR 4:30-6:30 PM; meets with graduate class AH 800

Art History 500: From Mecca to Dubai: Current Issues in the Architecture of the Arabian Gulf.
Jennifer Pruitt, W 4:30-6:30 PM; meets with graduate class AH 800

This graduate (and advanced undergraduate) seminar will center on how the state appears in contemporary art, both representationally and institutionally. However, instead of considering the state to be only a political unit, this course will also consider the state as a more general term indicating a condition of being. This double definition of state, as authoritative and affective, will guide us to ask who or what is made visible in contemporary art and who or what remains stateless.

Art History 515: The Body and the Senses in Medieval Art
Thomas Dale, Wed, 4:00-6:00 PM; meets with graduate class AH 815

In medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire, visual images and physical artifacts–their form and materials as well as their subject matter or iconography–were endowed with considerable power to affect the minds and behaviors of the spectator. Images and objects served, particularly in the realm of religion, to mediate the experience of the sacred, communicating between the invisible or the immaterial and the material world of the body and the senses. In the medieval imagination, images literally came alive, touching, speaking to, embracing the beholder; crucifixes bled, Marian images wept and lactated. Similarly in medieval rituals and para-liturgical dramas such as the Deposition of the Cross or the Officium Stellae, images physically moved and appeared to interact with the viewer.

In the wake of the “sensorial turn” in the humanities and increased scrutiny of the material aspects of images and their making, this seminar invites students to consider how medieval art affected medieval viewers and appealed to both the intellect and the emotions, in both sacred and secular contexts, considering the significance of materials, processes of making, formal qualities, modes and settings of display, ritual functions and performance. We will also examine contemporary theories of materiality and affect to assess the extent to which they can be applied to the medieval context.

Asian 300: Intro to Comics & Graphic Novels: Theory, History, Praxis
Adam Kern, Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:00-2:15 PM.

Communication Arts 454: Critical Film Analysis
Benjamin Singer, Lecture MW 2:30-3:45 PM; Lab F 11:00 AM-1:00 PM

Intensive analysis of selected films, using contemporary critical theories and methods.

Communication Arts 613: Japanese Cinema
Benjamin Singer, Lecture MW 4-5:15 PM; Lab M 6:00-8:00 PM.

A survey of Japanese Cinema through the 1970’s exploring social, political and cultural influences, industrial history, directorial styles, popular genres, and aesthetic innovations.

Design Studies 527: Global Artisans
Jennifer Angus, TR 11:00 AM-1:30 PM.

In the field of design, there has been an increased emphasis on ethical practices in production and consumption. Utilizing “design thinking”, students in this project-based survey course will be exposed to important issues surrounding small-scale artisan production and develop valuable hands-on skills working with artisan partners through design, quality control, branding and story- telling. Topics may include: fair trade development, product design, cultural implications, as well as pricing, marketing, and sales.

Gender and Womens Studies 428: Gender and Expressive Culture
(crosslisted with Folklore 428)
Christine Garlough, Tuesdays 4:00-6:30 PM

Examines the relationship between dominant images of women and men and their self-images, as they emerge in expressive culture in various societies.

History 201: “Visible History,” a Historian’s Craft
Lee Wandel, MW 4:00-5:15 PM.

The past is visible. That means many things. The past has left many different sorts of artifacts: not simply texts of various kinds, themselves visible, but also objects of daily and religious life, images, buildings, instruments of music, navigation, and the sciences. With the emergence of documentaries, the past seems to have become visible in another way perhaps drawing upon those artifacts to reconstruct. Are these visible in the same ways? This class will explore methods historians use for analyzing objects, images, buildings, even as we use those methods to interrogate films that claim to document the past in some way. Students will have a variety of writing and oral assignments – this is a CommB course.

ILS 204: Art and Literature, Humanism to Posthumanism (Renaissance to Contemporary)
Mike Vanden Heuvel, MW 12:05-12:55 + 1 50-minute discussion section OR Comm B, 4-credit option + 2 weekly discussion sections

ILS 204 looks at the literature and arts, broadly conceived, through an interdisciplinary and integrative lens. Painting, sculpture, architecture, performance, music, dance, different forms of literature, film, street art and contemporary video/installation art – are placed within the historical and cultural context in which they emerge. We focus on how the ideas and values -‐regarding religion, philosophy, political thought, social practices, and aesthetics – shape and make possible the various expressions of Western art and literature during this period. The course spans the rise of Humanism in the Renaissance to the emergence of Posthumanism in the contemporary world. Students will be encouraged to look critically at the results of Western civilization even as they are invited to admire its many achievements.

Fall 2018

AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

AAS 241 / AH 241 – Introduction to African Art & Architecture
Henry Drewal
Monday & Wednesday @ 1:20PM-2:10PM

This course examines the rich heritage of African arts and architecture as they shape and have been shaped by the histories and cultural values (social, political, religious, philosophical, and aesthetic) of African peoples, both past and present, on the continent where humanity — and art — began. Topics include: artists and creative process; an historical overview of five major traditions (26,000 BCE to 1900 CE); textiles, decorative, and body arts; architecture; and contemporary expressions. Museum visits, artists’ demonstrations, and films supplement the course. Requirements: 1 short paper (analysis of an African art object); mid-term exam; 2 Africa-related event reviews; and final exam. All readings online. Extra-credit arts-related projects encouraged – African arts festival concludes semester.

AAS 303 – Blacks, Films, and Society
Thulani Davis
Tuesday @ 2:25PM – 5:25PM

Study of the interpretations of the Afro-American past conveyed via theatrical films and television; relationship to other images of blacks found throughout the popular culture; relationship to societal trends. Prerequisite: Sophomore status.

AAS 802 / AH 802 – Visual Cultures: Topics in Visual Cultures
Preeti Chopra
Monday @ 2:30PM – 4:30PM

Content will vary to facilitate in-depth engagement of critical facts, theories, and images in specific areas of specialization. Prerequisite: Graduate status and consent of instructor.

ART HISTORY

AH 241 / AAS 241 – Introduction to African Art & Architecture
Henry Drewal
Monday & Wednesday @ 1:20PM-2:10PM

This course examines the rich heritage of African arts and architecture as they shape and have been shaped by the histories and cultural values (social, political, religious, philosophical, and aesthetic) of African peoples, both past and present, on the continent where humanity — and art — began. Topics include: artists and creative process; an historical overview of five major traditions (26,000 BCE to 1900 CE); textiles, decorative, and body arts; architecture; and contemporary expressions. Museum visits, artists’ demonstrations, and films supplement the course. Requirements: 1 short paper (analysis of an African art object); mid-term exam; 2 Africa-related event reviews; and final exam. All readings online. Extra-credit arts-related projects encouraged – African arts festival concludes semester.

ART HIST 365 – The Concept of Contemporary Art
Michael Jay McClure
TuTh @ 1:00PM – 2:15PM

Traces out some of the radical changes in art produced after roughly 1950, or what might be called contemporary art. By using the term contemporary, however, we also refer to a certain broadly defined set of ideas that inform and emerge from this highly diverse production. The course will largely (although not exclusively) focus on American and European art after the “decline” of Modernism. That entails familiarizing the class with movements ranging from color field painting, to postmodern production, to performance, video, and installation. Additionally, attention will be paid to artists and artwork that are not adequately represented by the traditional categories of art history.

ART HIST 415 / MEDIEVAL 415 – Topics in Medieval Art
Thomas Dale
TuTh @ 11:00AM – 12:15PM

An advanced lecture course, covering specific aspects of Medieval art. Topics may include: “Death and the Afterlife in Medieval Art”; “Civic Art and Architecture and Public Space in Medieval Italy”; “Rome in the Middle Ages”; “Pilgrimage & the Cult of the Saints in Medieval & Byzantine Art.”

ART HIST 430 – Topics in Visual Culture
TuTh @ 2:30PM – 3:45PM

Introduces key issues, theories, and methods in visual cultures studies, emphasizing aspects that affect the practices of art history and providing a changing topical focus that addresses new research in this developing interdisciplinary area.

ART HIST 506 – Curatorial Studies Exhibition Practice
Sarah Anne Carter
Wed @ 4:00PM – 6:00PM

This course will engage students in all aspects of the preparation of an exhibition for the Chazen Museum of Art or other exhibition spaces on campus. Students will help conceptualize the exhibition and its layout, research and interpret individual objects, prepare wall texts for the display and other materials published in print or online in conjunction with the exhibition. The specific topic will be different each time the course is taught. Enroll Info: Junior Standing. At least one previous course in Art History at 300 level or above.

ART HIST 650 – History of Books and Print Culture in Europe and North America
Jonathan Senchyne
Mon @ 1:30PM – 4:00PM

History of books and print culture in the West from ancient times to the present. Focus on the influence of reading and writing on social, cultural, and intellectual life. Methodologies, theories, and sources for study of book and print culture history.

ART HIST 776 – Topics in Chinese Art History
Yuhang Li
TuTh @ 4:15PM – 5:30PM

This course typically meets with an intermediate to advanced level lecture course. However, the requirements for graduate students are different, consisting of journal entries, presentations, and a substantial research paper. Meets-with courses include ” Early Chinese Art: From Antiquity to the Tenth Century,” “Later Chinese Art: From Tenth Century to Contemporary,” and “Topics in Asian Art.”

AH 802 / AAS 802 – Visual Cultures: Topics in Visual Cultures
Preeti Chopra
Monday @ 2:30PM – 4:30PM

Content will vary to facilitate in-depth engagement of critical facts, theories, and images in specific areas of specialization. Prerequisite: Graduate status and consent of instructor.

COMMUNICATION ARTS

CommArts 347 / HICLA – Race, Ethnicity, and Media
Jason Lopez
MoWe @ 2:30PM – 3:45PM

Introduction to the changing images of race and ethnicity in U.S. entertainment media and popular culture.  Surveys history, key concepts and contemporary debates regarding mediated representation of ethnic minorities. Critical and cultural studies approaches are emphasized.

COM ARTS 400 – The Films of Alfred Hitchcock
Maria Belodubrovskaya
MoWe @ 2:30PM – 3:45PM & Fr 11:00AM – 1:00PM

Studies the major films of Alfred Hitchcock. Investigates the enduring power of his movies; contributions to genre and popular cinema; storytelling techniques; stylistic mastery; approach to romance, suspense, and action; status as an American auteur; and control over the audience’s thoughts and feelings.

COM ARTS 448 – Media and National Identity
Jonathan Gray
TuTh @ 11:00AM – 12:15PM

Examination of the various roles that film, television, and other media play in creating, challenging, and negotiating national and global identities.

COM ARTS 455 – French Film
Kelley Conway
TuTh @ 9:30AM – 10:45AM & Wed @ 6:00PM – 8:00PM

Survey of French cinema from 1895 to the present. Emphasis on aesthetic trends, film movements, film industry, and cultural context.

COM ARTS 462 – American Independent Cinema
JJ Murphy
Tu @ 2:25PM – 4:55PM & Mon 7:00PM – 9:00PM

History of American independent narrative cinema with particular attention to the impact various art movements and subcultures have had on its development over the past 60 years.

COM ARTS 552 – Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
Jeff Smith
MoWe @ 12:05PM – 12:55PM & Tue @ 6:30PM – 8:30PM

An examination of contemporary Hollywood films focusing on the interrelations of cinematic narrative, style, technology, and institutions. It surveys the work of major directors and considers the box office impact of key genres and film cycles. Among the films screened in the course are DIE HARD, TOY STORY, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and INCEPTION.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

CL 350, Lecture 003 – Women, Art, and Psychoanalysis in Latin America
Beatriz L. Botero
Tr @ 11:00AM – 12:15PM

An introduction to the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century in Latin America, our focus will be on literary works, and critical theories of the avant-garde, but we will also consider the visual arts. We will examine the work of artists such as Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Tarsila do Amaral, and Doris Salcedo.

CL 466 – Gender and Technology: Literature and Visual Culture
Sarah Wells
MoWe @ 4:00PM – 5:15PM

This course explores the political, ethical, and artistic dimensions of the intersection between technology and gender through literature, film, and theory from across the globe. We will explore the following questions: Why are new media, often depicted as both terrifying and seductive, frequently feminized? How do these depictions shift according to media (eg., the telephone, cinema, computer)? How do understandings of masculinity shape our understanding of technologies? Finally, can there be a depiction of technology that does not center on gender? The course will culminate in final projects of students’ own design, drawing on course materials to open up new lines of inquiry.

CL 500: Space is the Place: From Copernicus to Elon Musk
Frederic Neyrat
Tu @ 1:00PM – 3:30PM

This class is an inquiry into our relation with outer space. What philosophical, historical, and scientific developments gave rise to the Space Age? Why do we want to go “out there”? Is not the Earth already “out there,” already a planet amongst other planets wandering in the infinite universe? To answer these questions, the class will be divided in two parts: 1/ First, we will study the Astronomical Revolution of the 17th century. Leaning on Lisa Messeri’s Placing Outer Space, we will also investigate the reasons for which the Earth could be considered an “exo-planet”; 2/ In the second part of the class, we will continue our exploration of the astronomical sphere through an investigation devoted to the Space Age and its metaphysical origins. Through the study of Russian Cosmism and Afro-Futurism, we will try to contemplate an alternative Space Age whose goal would not be the colonization and the exploitation of outer space but a metaphorical detour aimed at achieving the justice that has not been rendered on Earth.

DESIGN STUDIES

DS 579 – Virtual Reality
Kevin Ponto
TuTh @ 9:30AM – 10:45AM

Introduces students to the field of virtual reality and focuses on creating immersive, interactive virtual experiences. Survey topics include historical perspectives on virtual reality technology, computer graphics and 3D modeling, human perception and psychology, human computer interaction and user interface design. This course is designed for students with backgrounds in Computer Science, Engineering, Art, Architecture and Design. Students will work in interdisciplinary teams on projects, culminating in a final event that will be showcased to the public. While not an official uisite, the class will be technologically motivated; therefore students should be comfortable learning new software. The class will utilize publicly available game design software which provides tools and services for the creation of interactive content. While not necessary, students may find it helpful to have taken classes in programming and computer graphics (such COMP SCI 559: Computer Graphics) or in 3D modeling (such as ART 429: 3D Digital Studio I or DS 242: Visual Communication II).

DS 639 – Culture and Built Environment
Jung-hye Shin
TuTh @ 1:00PM – 2:15PM

The course explores cultural values embedded in buildings through understanding physical configurations, social organizations, practiced/symbolic/representational aspects of buildings.  The course covers a wide range of cultures and the built environments they produce including examples from the Americas, the Middle East, as well as those of the many ethnic minorities in the U.S.

EAST ASIAN STUDIES

E ASIAN 433 – Topics in East Asian Visual Cultures
TuTh @ 11:00AM – 12:15PM

Topics in the study of the visual cultures of East Asia from antiquity to the present. Focuses on illustrative texts and genres, major historiographic, theoretical, and methodological issues, and the technologies of vision and visuality in China, Japan, and Korea.

ENGLISH

ENGL 859 – Modes of Performance: Latin American Theater in Perspective
Paola Hernández
Wed @ 3:30PM – 6:30PM

This course is relevant to Latin American studies, theatre and performance studies, visual culture and public humanities students. It explores the many ways Latin American visual culture, theatre and other performative acts define the role of citizenship in different stages of the 20th and 21st century. We will focus our studies on how citizenship categorizes identity at national and multinational dimensions, while at the same time engaging issues of legal, cultural and political rights. We will begin by reassessing paradigms such as Bertolt Brecht’s “Verfremdung,” Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed,” anthropologist Victor Turner’s “social dramas,” and Eduardo Barba’s “third theatre” in an emerging global framework. We will consider a wide range of interconnected concepts, such as grotesco criollo, invisible theatre, epic theatre, theatre of the real, Biodramas, documentary and ecological methods to study issues of (im)migration, human rights, urban anthropology, ecological performance, border studies, and autobiographies on stage(s). Theorists, such as, Carlson, Taylor, Huyssen, Schechner, Rancière, Marc Augé, Gómez Peña, Butler, among others will help us identify more recent issues of citizenship in philosophy, anthropology and performance studies. Within this theoretical framework, we will then focus on how theatre and performative acts (political manifestations, public demonstrations, installations) both empower certain practices of belonging and participate in the critical analysis of the evolving discourse of citizenship. We will study a variety of Latin American plays in translation, performances, installations, and U.S. Latino theatre. This course is taught in English.

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

ENVIR ST 469 – The Making of the American Landscape
William Cronon
MoWe @ 2:30PM – 3:45PM

Surveys the historical geography and environmental history of the United States by tracing the evolution of the American landscape from precolonial times to the present, with special emphasis on teaching students skills they can use to interpret landscape history themselves.

HISTORY OF SCIENCE

HIST SCI 525 – Health and the Humanities
Jenell Johnson
TuTh @ 2:30PM – 3:45PM

Explores how a humanistic perspective can broaden our understanding of health and medicine. Specifically, we will examine the role of language and culture in the creation and circulation of biomedical knowledge; our lived experiences with illness (physical and mental); the intricate intersections of race, gender, sexuality, disability and medicine; the political dimensions of diagnosis, disease, and epidemics, and the role that fiction, creative non-fiction, comics, and film play in shaping our experiences with health and medicine as health care providers and as patients. The course does not assume any background in science or medicine. One of our recurrent topics, in fact, will be to consider how non-experts interact with medicine and its technical vocabularies. Although the primary objective of the course is to understand the cultural, social, and political dimensions of health and medicine, a secondary objective is for students to become more savvy patients and, for the few students who might emerge on the other side of the stethoscope one day, more well rounded health care professionals.

LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

LIT 329 – The Vampire in Literature and Film
Tomislav Longinovic

Tr @ 11:00AM – 12:15PM

This course explores the historical development of the vampire legend, from its roots in Slavic and East European folklore to the literary and cinematic variations on the legend from the 18thcentury until today.  Since the complex image of the vampire vacillates between imagination and reality, this will be a truly interdisciplinary course, spanning analyses drawn from medical anthropology to the discussions on literary and cinematic representations of the ancient creature of horror.

MEDIEVAL STUDIES

ART HIST 415 / MEDIEVAL 415 – Topics in Medieval Art
Thomas Dale
TuTh @ 11:00AM – 12:15PM

An advanced lecture course, covering specific aspects of Medieval art. Topics may include: “Death and the Afterlife in Medieval Art”; “Civic Art and Architecture and Public Space in Medieval Italy”; “Rome in the Middle Ages”; “Pilgrimage & the Cult of the Saints in Medieval & Byzantine Art.”

Spring 2018

continuously habitable zones philippe parrenoArt History 802: Topics in the Transdisciplinary Study of Visual Cultures: Necrocene, Necropolitics, Necrolandscaping
 Jill H. Casid
Tues. 4:30 – 6:30 | L170 Elvehjem Building

Planetary apocalypse, global catastrophisms, and the deaths of the future; extractivist capitalism and accumulation by dispossession; species extinction; anti-black, anti-trans, anti-queer, anti-woman, anti-crip violence and fascisms in the everyday; climate-change super-storms; environmental racisms and slow death; mass incarceration and social death; persistent war and the “right to maim”; drone warfare without combat; surveillance and killing at a remove; the normalization of terror; exacerbated forms of vulnerability and exposure by the retractions of state supports; refugee crisis; neo-colonial displacements and unhoming; and the barely living on in the wake of traumas that are not over: the Anthropocene great tipping point of the sixth extinction set in the context of the undead histories of empire, colonization, slavery, and the cataclysms of contact might well be characterized as the Necrocene. In confronting the life and death stakes of this planetary convergence, this seminar concerns the materializing effects and force of images and imaging. Asking about the limits of representation and particularly the landscape-form for reckoning with the death-worlds in which we find ourselves, this seminar is dedicated to thinking the possibilities of aesthetics for ethics and politics at the limits of life. Asking such questions as how to think the disavowed connections between forms of violence and loss often held apart, how to make sense of what defies sense in terms of scale (both micro and seemingly beyond reckoning) and temporality (at once slow and accelerating?), how to think with the histories of not just biopolitics (Foucault) and the control of life itself but also with necropolitics (Mbembe) or the subjugation of life to the power of death, this seminar sets in critical and creative constellation a set of key texts from critical visuality studies, ecological aesthetics, critical geography and landscape studies, critical Anthropocene studies, phenomenology, social and political theory, psychoanalytic theory, trauma studies, queer theory, trans theory, crip theory and afro-pessimism. This seminar satisfies the requirements for the Ph.D. minor and M.F.A./M.A. certificate in visual cultures. There are no pre-requisites for the course and seminar participants are strongly encouraged to pursue their own areas of specialization and research interests for their final projects.


Art History 800: Seminar Topics Course: Affect and Contemporary Art
Michael Jay McClure
Wed. 4:30 – 6:30 | L 170 Elvehjem Building

Affect, a psychological term which may be loosely defined as disposition, has gained currency within contemporary critical discourse in the Humanities. In particular, the idea that the same image, language, or law can be repeated but appear as affectively different, or that affective differences might work against normative power structures, has held certain political potential for scholars in a wide range of fields. At the same time, because contemporary art deals with disposition nearly always, and because contemporary art often exaggerates its affect (exploring states of melancholy, mania, and the deadpan, for instance) this seminar will test how contemporary art might augment and extend the notion of affect, while making important distinctions between affect and other qualitative phenomena such as mood and tone. 


Comic advertising this course.Comp Lit 203: Intro to Comics and Graphic Novels: Theory, History, Praxis
Adam Kern

The linchpin of a planned undergraduate certificate in Comics Studies (though not yet formally approved let alone pitched) , this course introduces students to the theory, history, and practice of “comix”—broadly defined to include cartoon strips, comic books, graphic novels, etc—in a comparative, transnational, global context. Special attention is paid to how comix by its very definition transcends the borders between framing panels, different cultures, as well as words and images.


Art History 430: Topics in Visual Culture: The Wake of Postmodernism
Michael Jay McClure
M/W 2:30 – 3:45 | L140 Elvehjem Building

Postmodernism, despite its name, is not that which comes after modernism, but a theory with a powerful impact on the Humanities and the Social Sciences. This course will define the features of postmodernism and see its lasting, and peculiar, effects in contemporary art. Indeed, if postmodernism questions the difference between the virtual and the actual, and if postmodern theory suggests that there is no reality but in images, contemporary art is a vital site for testing out its complex theories about life in the digital age. The aim of this course is to help student critically think through postmodernism, to question in far-reaching claims, and to apply it to the dissonant scene of contemporary art.


Still from Art History 431 |GWS 449: Topics in Theory: Queer Theory, Visual Culture
Jill H. Casid
T/R 1:00 – 2:15 | L140 Elvehjem Building

This course introduces key concepts in queer, queer of color, trans, and crip theory through visual practices and tactics that challenge the terms of visibility and what and how we see across art and media. The mobilization of the very words “queer” and “crip” negotiate shame and stigma by occupying and reworking terms of injury and often signal a certain “bad attitude.” In its critical questioning of assumptions regarding norms, queer embraces deviance and indeterminacy. In its focus on performance and discourse production, the practice of queering also attends to the intersectional analysis of sexuality, that is, the imbrication of questions of desire and identification with embodiment, gender, class, ability, and race. Queering is an activity of questioning, a critical and creative practice of turning taken-for-granted tropes that makes strange the assumed “naturalness” of binary systems. To queer is to affect the ethical and political activation of speculative theorizing and aesthetics. The work of queering also involves a self-critical approach to one’s own discursive and visual production. Throughout the course, we will be forging links between queer theorization about visual culture, interventions in the archive, and critical tactics of queering.


AFROAMER 679 | GEN&WS 679: Visual Culture, Gender and Critical Race Theory
Johanna Almiron
T 2:25-5:00PM

This course examines tensions between visual and verbal representations that variably construct and negotiate power relations in racialized human experience.


AFROAMER 367 | GEN&WS 367: Art and Visual Culture: Women of the African Diaspora and Africa
Johanna Almiron
M 2:25-5:00PM

This course focuses on the art and visual culture by/or pertaining to women throughout the African Diaspora and Africa. Though the focus is on 10th century art by black women, it will go into visual culture (art objects, photographs, images, dress, culturally-coded


COM ARTS 468: Producing for Internet TV and Video
Eric Hoyt
TR 9:30-10:45AM

A laboratory and studio course for producing Internet television and video (which encompasses a wide range of media content, from expensive Netflix and Amazon shows to low-budget YouTube channels). With its focus on “producing” and the role of the producer, the course combines the hands-on production work of writing, shooting, and editing videos with an emphasis on entrepreneurship and the innovation of sustainable business models. Students will work in groups to produce videos across three Internet video genres-music video, comedy short, and commercial. All students will occupy the role of the producer for one of the assignments. Additionally, students will complete a final project that is a business plan for a new Internet TV program or venture. Students must complete COM ARTS 155 or 355 and submit an application in order to be considered for this course.


black and white photo and students dancing on stageSpanish 564: From Text to Stage: Playing in Spanish
Paola Hernández

Have you ever wondered how a play is staged or how to find a place to put theory into practice? Even if you have no experience acting or creating costumes, this class invites you to explore the artistic side of yourself! The objective of this course is to introduce students to the complexities of Latin American theatre of the 20th and 21st centuries with an emphasis on both dramatic and scenic components. Issues such as gender, nationality, history, violence, immigration, identity and memory will be part of our ongoing discussion of the plays as we simultaneously distinguish aspects related to the theatrical stage and performance. The organization of the course is divided into two parts. First, students will read a variety of Latin American plays while becoming familiar with some of the most pertinent thinkers such as Artaud, Brecht, Barba, Stanislavsky, Grotowski who have heavily influenced playwrights in Latin America. During the second part of this course, we move to the Play Circle (Memorial Union), where students will learn how to stage a full-length play that they will have read.  Set, lights, costume designs, production and direction will be part of this collective endeavor and each student will assume an active role in the performance (acting is not necessary). Students with interests in music, crafts, design can help explore theatre through the live performance. The end project is to perform in front of a live audience. Class and performance are in Spanish. One weekly response paper, two short analytical papers (6-8 pages), and one live performance are required.


Nicki Minaj with pink wig next to a Barbie version next to a chrome plated versionEnglish 245: Seminar in the Major / Topic: PLASTIC! Surface, Substance, Selfie 
Kathleen Schaag
TuTh 1:00-2:15pm, Helen C. White 6110, Prereqs: 6 credits of introductory literature, Honors Option

 From commodities (Tupperware) and explosives (atomic bomb) to surfaces (plastic surgery) and synapses (neuroplasticity), plastics saturate the scene of 20th-21st century American culture. We’ll consider the conceptual, aesthetic, and political dimensions of manufactured plastics and biological plasticity to reflect upon the relationship between self, society, and environment. Interrogating tensions between nature and artifice, surface and depth, and performance and materiality, the course will survey a plastic landscape that produces the Barbie doll as well as the cyborg. Looking at music videos, photos, plays, poems, and performances by pop artists such as Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga and playwrights, artists, and poets such as Yoko Ono, Suzan-Lori Parks, Cindy Sherman, Cassils, Kate Durbin, and Adrian Piper, we’ll explore the ways these plastic performances of material self-molding complicate social constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. Course requirements include two formal essays and a visual essay.

Art History 479 – Art and History in Africa
Henry Drewal        
M/W 4:00 – 5:15 | L150 Elvehjem Building

Using a “streaming” model of art history/history proposed by the late Professor Jan Vansina, we will explore the various ancient rivers of art/visual culture in West Africa – Nok, Igbo Ukwu, Ife, Owo, Benin, Jenne, Kanem-Bornu, Lower Niger Bronze Complex, etc. – during an era (500 BCE – 1500 CE) of major city-states, kingdoms, and empires. We will assess the visual, oral, and cultural evidence for sources, convergences, diffusions, and independent inventions as we attempt to re-construct the richness and diversity of artistic traditions in this region.


Art History 603: Curatorial Studies Colloquium
Henry Drewal
Mon. 5:30 – 7:30 | L170 Elvehjem Building

This course introduces advanced undergraduate & graduate students to a broad range of questions related to curatorial work – the poetics, politics, and practicalities of exhibitions. The course is a series of sessions about curating a wide variety of materials: art, film, music, books, anthropology/culture, archaeology, history, geology, zoology, dance, etc. Experts from campus, the city, and the region will engage with each other and with the class on the theories, objectives, and processes of conceiving, designing, and mounting exhibitions.


Art History 576 |Art History 876 : Proseminar in Chinese Art: Visualizing Chinese Opera
Yuhang Li
Tues. 4:00 – 6:00 | L170 Elvehjem Building)

The passion for opera throughout China from tenth century to present day was not restricted to the stage but permeated the visual and material landscape of everyday life, from the court on down. Operatic characters and stories were favored as pictorial and decorative motifs across the full spectrum of visual mediums from tomb carvings, temple murals and scroll paintings to popular prints, to illustrated books and commercial advertisements, from architectural deco to appliques on furniture, from carved utensils, ceramics, textiles to photographs and films.  These materials have been usually employed as visual evidence in the study of the history of Chinese opera; however, this proseminar inquiries into the unique characteristic of theatrical images as pictorial motif.

Fall 2017

The protester Ieshia Evans being detained in Baton Rough, LA, on July 9, 2016. Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

Art History 355: History of Photography: The Archive, Desire, & Writing with Light
Jill Casid
Tuesdays and Thursdays 11:00AM – 12:15PM
Elvehjem L140

“For the brief moment immortalized by a photograph, the impossible happens, and we are encouraged.” With this declaration in the July 26 New York Times column on photography dedicated to “The Superhero Photographs of the Black Lives Matter Movement,” critic Teju Cole addresses the power of certain photographs to go viral and affect the everyday.

This course offers an introduction to the history and theory of the diverse and pervasive field of photography from its origins in the desire to work with light and shadows to declarations of its death in the drive toward the digital. The course emphasizes that to understand the history of photography means exploring the range of photography’s social, political and cultural practices from the documentary to the selfie and Instagram, from the conventions of the photo I.D. and tactics of surveillance to the use of photography in avant-garde art practices. The readings for the course introduce you to the important critics who demonstrate how issues of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and economic, historical, and geopolitical relations of power are inseparable from the historical study of the medium of photography — its practice, dissemination, valuation, and interpretation. No prior knowledge of the history of photography or art history is assumed or required.


San Lazaro e Infanta_Hotel Habana seriesSpanish 468: The Cuban Evolution
Guillermina De Ferrari
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11-12:15
Van Hise 478

Whereas the 1959 Cuban Revolution sought to change political, artistic and social structures radically and suddenly, the following 58 years have seen Cubans cope with censorship, vigilance, acute economic crises, scarcity, and political staleness by constantly changing and adapting. Cubans have shown unexpected ways to form social bonds, create art, and even attain narrow margins of political agency in hostile conditions. This course will explore how notions of community, artistic innovation and creativity are negotiated in a state of precariousness showing resourcefulness and resilience. By analyzing contemporary literature, art, film, and digital culture, this course will try to elucidate the ethics and aesthetics that define today’s Cuban social and artistic spheres, as well as the place the island holds in an international imaginary.


Black and white photo of guerilla girls art group. 5 women dressed in guerrilla masks. One with fist raised in defiance and resistanceArt 470/570: Arts for Social Change
Laurie Beth Clark
Fridays 10am – 4pm

Whether poetic of didactic, the arts have a role in helping us to imagine and realize a better world. This special topics studio course will explore the history, theory, and practice of socially engaged projects across all the arts. Through readings and the production of creative works, we will explore the numerous ways in which arts can align with social justice.


Ganzeer’s Tank v. Bicycle (Image Credit: STRIKE Magazine)Art History 440: Art and Power in the Arab World

Jennifer Pruitt
Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:00 – 2:15
Elvehjem L140

This course considers the use of art and architecture as an expression of power in the Arab world, from the seventh century to the present. Beginning with the establishment of the caliphate and ending with the arts of revolution following the Arab Spring, we will investigate the shifting role of art and architecture in the quest for political dominance. With a particular focus on the arts of Cairo, Baghdad, Cordoba, Mecca, Jerusalem, Damascus, and the modern Arabian Gulf, we will explore competing visions of power and sources of legitimacy, through the lens of artistic production.

Themes include the role of cultural heritage in political disputes; visual rhetoric of the caliphate; contemporary debates over the nature of medieval Islamic art and culture; conflict over holy spaces; artistic exchange between Europe and the Middle East.

Incorporation of relevant current events in the Middle East will be a regular feature of class discussion.


Still image from Teatro Línea de Sombra's performance of AmarilloSpanish 802: Modes of Performance: Theatricality in Latin America
Paola Hernandez

This course explores the many manifestations and theatrical movements of the twentieth and twenty-first century in Latin America where staged action—theatre, installations, and political manifestations—activates audiences. We will consider a wide range of interconnected concepts, such as grotesco criollo, invisible theatre, epic theatre, theatre of the real, biodramas, documentary and ecological methods to study issues of immigration, human rights, urban anthropology, environmental performance, and autobiographies on stage(s). Theoretical readings will include works by Brecht, Piscator, Turner, Taylor, Martin, Schechner, Ranciere, Hal Foster, Butler, Theresa May, among others. Primary sources will include works by Discépolo, Gambaro, Boal, Cossa, Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, Teatro Línea de Sombra, Spregelburd, Romina Paula, Lola Arias, Vivi Tellas, Guillermo Calderón, Mapa Teatro, Mariano Pensotti, Federico León, and more.


Courtesan Ochie from the Koise house in Shinyashiki in the district KobikichoEast Asian Languages and Literature/Literature in Translation 376: Manga Adam Kern Tuesdays & Thursday 1:00-2:15pm 104 Van Hise Hall

Surveys the manga (Japanese comic strips, comic books, graphic novels) from precursors in premodern woodblock-printed booklets to contemporary manifestations in subgenres like gekiga, mecha, shonen, and shôjo. Draws on critical writings on literature, popular culture, and visual culture. Although Japanese language proficiency is not required for Lit Trans 231, those with Japanese proficiency should take the East Asian 376 version of the course, which requires East Asian 104 or consent of the instructor.


Egungun - African man wearing an elaborate costumeArt History 506: Curatorial Studies Exhibition Practice
Henry Drewal
Monday 4:30-6:30PM
Elvehjem L170

This exhibition seminar is being taught in preparation for the African Studies Program Spring Symposium (April 6-8, 2018) on the theme of Honoring Ancestors in Africa: Funerary Arts and Acts and performances by Egungun masqueraders and musicians from Oyotunji African Village in South Carolina. Students enrolled in this seminar will take on the challenges of representing African arts, cultures and histories as well as explore the (im)possibilities of representing sensory experience in a gallery. Using the Design Gallery of the School of Human Ecology (SOHE), students will be asked to conceptualize, research, and help to create the exhibition and plan the publicity and public programming, considering different approaches to similar exhibitions (art-historical, anthropological, historical, virtual, etc.).


three works of contemporary artArt History 801: Historiography, Theory, and Methods in Visual Culture
Jill Casid
Thursdays 4:30-6:30PM
Elvehjem L170

This seminar is the core requirement for the M.F.A./M.A. certificate and Ph.D. minor minor in the transdisciplinary study of visual cultures. The seminar charts the formation and history of the dynamic, multi-stranded, and still changing field. It seeks to build a practice-based knowledge of the theories and methods important to the field’s formation as well as those driving the field’s future. You will develop a set of skills in critical reading, research, analysis, writing, and presentation (including visual presentation methods) that will be of use to you throughout graduate school and in your professional life beyond. Toward these goals, the course has three main dimensions. As your introduction to the Ph.D. minor and M.A./M.F.A. certificate, the course will take advantage of the programming of the Center for Visual Cultures to frame your encounter with the leading questions driving the field, assist in facilitating the formation of a network and intellectual community, and help point you toward the research resources
here that may support your work As your introduction to the practices in the study of visual cultures, the course explores the controversies that drove the field’s formation, its complex relations to various disciplines and the issues, challenges, and debates fueling the ongoing transformations of the field. The readings are necessarily selective and partial. Thus, you are encouraged to use the syllabus as a map leading you to deepen your knowledge through further study. As a practicum, the seminar also emphasizes the development of essential skills in critical analysis of the visual and visual thinking and communication that are vital to your success in graduate study and future viability in the field. In addition to weekly readings and discussion, work for the course will include visual analysis, conducting primary and secondary research, producing and delivering polished oral presentations, and producing critical and creative visual interventions and forms of writing. As this course is designed to enhance your professional formation, you are strongly encouraged to navigate the course architecture of readings and assignments according to the needs and dictates of your own research and developing areas of specialization.


'StripeTease' by Tam Tran  Asian American Studies 240: Asian American Visual and Popular Representation
Leslie Bow
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:00-12:15pm
224 Ingraham Hall

How does race circulate through visual mediums? This course explores the ways in which Asian Americans are “seen” in U.S. history, popular culture, and mainstream media. Beginning with eugenics, court cases, caricature, and stereotyping that fix racial classification, we will move to contemporary creative works that invoke race as fluid performance. How do Asian American artists, filmmakers, graphic novelists, illustrators, or internet celebrities portray identity as both essential and fictive, dependent upon yet transcending the body? Our inquiry will focus on reading racial signs and their meaning. We will foreground fantasies of bodilessness enabled by technology and the internet; race and gender passing as a meditation on surface and interior; sexuality and fetishism; multi-racialism and futurity; and the implications of reading race as it is grafted onto nonhuman forms: animals, objects, avatars, robots. How does fantasy allow for the circulation of virtual Asians, race without racial subjects?At the center of our discussion will be questions about authenticity, coalition, and activism surrounding image or performance as “discriminatory action.” But we will also explore fantasy and desire as conduits of political meaning: race fetishism, techno-orientalism and anime, kawaii or cute style.How do fantasy projections of Asianness also project cultural anxieties about Asian Americans?

Requirements: Attendance and participation; weekly posting; midterm exam; final written project. This is a seminar-style course with an emphasis on discussion and participation. Students will have the option to choose the topic of their final projects.

Possible Texts
American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang
Monstress, Marjorie Liu
Part Asian/100% Hapa, Kip Fulbeck
The Arrival, Shaun Tan
Grapefruit, Yoko Ono
Asian American Media Activism, Lori Kido Lopez
Films will most likely include The Human Robot; The Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Visual art by Nikki S. Lee, Laurel Nakadate, Byron Kim, Laurie Simmons


Why Buffy MattersCommunication Arts 451: Television Criticism

Jonathan Gray
Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:00-2:15pm
Analysis of selected television programming, interpretation of contemporary television programs, and survey of existing critical approaches.

Prerequisites: CA 351.

Communication Arts 540: Television Genres (Television Comedy)
Jonathan Gray
Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-10:45am
An examination of a specific television genre, analyzing it as a narrative, economic, cultural, and political entity and exploring its role in perpetuating and/or challenging ideas of what society is or could be.

Prerequisites: CA 250 and 351; jr st.


 Edo Japan - woodblockEast Asian Languages and Literature 433 / 833: Topics in East Asian Visual Culture—The Spectacular Culture of Early Modern Japan
Adam Kern
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:00-12:15pm
219 Van Hise

Topics in the study of the visual cultures of East Asia from antiquity to the present. Focuses on illustrative texts and genres, major historiographic, theoretical, and methodological issues, and the technologies of vision and visuality in China, Japan, and Korea. Explores the visual culture of early modern Japan (1600-1868), an East Asian civilization that underwent an abrupt transition from a period of relative isolation from the West to a period of paradigm-shifting exposure to it during the mid-eighteenth century. Takes up emblematic texts, theoretical issues, and the history of technologies of visuality, paying especial attention to transmogrifications over this momentous epoch, in order to grasp the salient features of early modern Japanese visual culture. Texts are drawn from Japanese cartography, Dutch-inspired anatomies, peep-box scenes, the performance of kabuki and puppet plays in woodblock prints as well as on stage, the visual-verbal imagination in haiku poetry and painting as well as book illustrations, miniature figurines, libidinous representation and erotic textiles, the scopic regime of advertising in shop signs, circulars, and in product placement within mass-published texts, images of the cultural and physiognomical Other, the exercise of political power through landscape design as well as architecture, and the cultural politics of the gaze.


Food Culutres - bunch of vegetablesArt 908: Food Cultures
Laurie Beth Clark
Thursdays 4:30 – 7pm

This graduate seminar will take a cultural approach to food studies. By looking at the ways that artists and humanists work with food (both as theory and as practice), we can extend the knowledges that are being contributed by natural and social scientists to include the everyday and vernacular ways that people engage with food in diverse cultural contexts.

Spring 2017

Art History 354: Cross-Cultural Arts around the Atlantic Rim
Jill H. Casid
Tuesday/Thursday 11:00-12:15

“Cross-Cultural Arts around the Atlantic Rim” takes its name from the Atlantic Ocean, that body of water traversed by slave ships in the Middle Passage that continues to connect Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean in a circuit of transverse influence. By taking its name and its outline not from a land mass but from the fluid boundary and conduit of the ocean, the Atlantic model allows us to trace the interdependence of what have been artificially and problematically separated into such binaries as “Western” and “Non-Western.” In his critical response to ethnocentric and nationalistic models of culture, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), sociologist Paul Gilroy calls for an approach to cultural studies that would account for the ways in which slavery, colonization of the Americas and the Caribbean, and the transatlantic movement of peoples, goods, artifacts, and ideas shaped the formation of what we call “modernity.” This undergraduate lecture course takes off from Gilroy’s proposal that we consider the Atlantic “as one single, complex unit of analysis in our discussions of the modern world.” In our study of the networks of exchange around the Atlantic, we will explore what happens when we “use the model of the Atlantic to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.” The first unit of the course is dedicated to two broad goals: developing critical tools of analysis that allow us to talk about cross-influence and hybridity and to introducing the ways in which key aspects of visual culture from mapping and landscaping to painting and printmaking are inseparable from the history of empire-building and slavery and yet have also been used as tools of resistance. The second unit focuses on the importance of the graphical text, cartoon avatars, performed stereotypes, and changeable trickster figures in the Americas for the production of counter-normative and doubled or hybrid identities, for the retelling of history, and for survival in the face of genocide. We consider the inter-relation of such seemingly diverse works as the illustrated chronicle of colonial Peru by Guaman Poma de Ayala and the contemporary version, the Codex Espangliensis, by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, the comic book (super)heroes appropriated and resignified in such diverse works as the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jaune Quick-to-see-Smith, and the graphic tale Maus by Art Spiegelman. The third unit addresses a set of tough, ongoing questions about how we value and judge, about the roles of multi-media and installation arts, cinema, and the institution of the museum in forming identities in relation, for example, to particular versions of the past, about the representation of the body, family, and land in the construction and contestation of the “normative” and the “deviant” or the “minority,” and about the political uses of visual practices to transfigure everyday social conditions of injustice, waste, and shame.

Course description

Art History 475: Japanese Ceramics and Allied Arts

Quitman Eugene Phillips
Tuesday/Thursday 1:00-2:15
Elvehjem L150

Art History 801: Historiography, Theory and Methods in Visual Culture
Jill H. Casid
Thursday 4:30-6:30
Elvehjem L170

This seminar is the core requirement for the M.F.A./M.A. certificate and Ph.D. minor minor in the transdisciplinary study of visual cultures. The seminar charts the formation and history of the dynamic, multi-stranded, and still changing field. It seeks to build a practice-based knowledge of the theories and methods important to the field’s formation as well as those driving the field’s future. You will develop a set of skills in critical reading, research, analysis, writing, and presentation (including visual presentation methods) that will be of use to you throughout graduate school and in your professional life beyond. Toward these goals, the course has three main dimensions. As your introduction to the Ph.D. minor and M.A./M.F.A. certificate, the course will take advantage of the programming of the Center for Visual Cultures to frame your encounter with the leading questions driving the field, assist in facilitating the formation of a network and intellectual community, and help point you toward the research resources here that may support your work As your introduction to the practices in the study of visual cultures, the course explores the controversies that drove the field’s formation, its complex relations to various disciplines and the issues, challenges, and debates fueling the ongoing transformations of the field. The readings are necessarily selective and partial. Thus, you are encouraged to use the syllabus as a map leading you to deepen your knowledge through further study. As a practicum, the seminar also emphasizes the development of essential skills in critical analysis of the visual and visual thinking and communication that are vital to your success in graduate study and future viability in the field. In addition to weekly readings and discussion, work for the course will include visual analysis, conducting primary and secondary research, producing and delivering polished oral presentations, and producing critical and creative visual interventions and forms of writing. As this course is designed to enhance your professional formation, you are strongly encouraged to navigate the course architecture of readings and assignments according to the needs and dictates of your own research and developing areas of specialization.

Course Description

Comparative Literature 770: Labor, Cinema, Theory
Sarah Ann Wells
Wednesday 3:30-6:00
3425 Sterling Hall

Geography 501: Space and Place: A Geography of Experience
Keith Woodward
Tuesday/Thursday 1:00-2:15
350 Science Hall

Space and place are arguably the central concepts of human geography. Whether we are considering public life, globalization, economic unevenness, the questions of difference and identity, or any number of other critical areas, space and place serve as active components in how such problems express and ‘ground’ themselves. By this, human geographers mean that space and place are something more than containers for human activities. Rather, they produce elements of social life. As Edward Said put it, “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography” (Said 1993: 7). Thus, the past several decades have seen an explosion in the variety of spaces and places that affect our lives and our world, including spaces of everyday life, representation and the politics of space- and place-making, safe spaces and dangerous spaces, place and identity, spaces of difference and oppression, and so on.

This course will explore a variety of grounded, ‘empirical’ studies with theoretical works devoted to the problems of space and place, regularly returning to how we – and our authors – square the circle between ‘theory and practice.’

In seeking to understand the social production of space, we will work carefully through Neil Smith’s magnum opus, Uneven Development. This is a dense, but beautifully written theoretical text devoted to the politics of scale and uneven geographical development. Kosek’s provides a wonderful ethnographic study of a complex, southwestern space formed through a tangle of relationships and “everyday practices by Chicano activists, white environmentalists, and state officials as well as nuclear scientists, heroin addicts, and health workers.” Bill Bunge’s Fitzgerald will give us an early glimpse of the complex relationships that emerge when doing social justice in the city. In addition to these works, we will explore a variety of shorter tests devoted to identity and space, the sense of place, nonhuman spatiality, and a host of other wild concepts essential to the human geographer’s toolkit.

Course syllabus

History 201, Section 002: Visible History
Lee Palmer Wandel
Tuesday/Thursday 4:00-5:15
1221 Humanities

The past is visible.  That means many things.  The past has left many different sorts of artifacts: not simply texts of various kinds, themselves visible, but also objects of daily and religious life, images, buildings, instruments of music, navigation, and the sciences.  With the emergence of “documentaries,  the past seems to have become visible in another way perhaps drawing upon those artifacts to “reconstruct.   Are these “visible  in the same ways?  This class will explore methods historians use for analyzing objects, images, buildings, even as we use those methods to interrogate films that claim to document the past in some way.  Students will have a variety of writing and oral assignments – this is a CommB course.

Integrated Liberal Studies 204: Art and Literature, Renaissance to Modern (“Italy Mix”)
Dijana Mitrovic

ILS 204 looks at the literature and arts, broadly conceived, through an interdisciplinary and integrative lens. That is, rather than focusing in depth on one art form or another, it treats multiple artistic disciplines – painting, sculpture, architecture, performance, music, dance, all forms of literature, and contemporary forms of video/installation art – and places them within the historical and cultural context in which they emerged. The focus of the course will be less on “art appreciation” and more on how cultural contexts – the ideas and values regarding religion, philosophy, political thought, social practices, and aesthetics – shape and make possible the various expressions of Western art and literature during this period, with special emphasis on Italy. The integrative learning takes place when we analyze how, collectively, these forms of expression constitute cultural activity. Students will be encouraged to look critically at the results of Western civilization even as they are invited to admire its many achievements.

Interdepartmental Seminar 982: Race, Fiction, and Visual Culture in Latin America
Victor Goldgel-Carballo
Monday 3:30-5:30
Mosse Humanities Building 2251

Focusing on Cuba, and using regions such as Mexico, Ecuador, and Brazil as points of comparison, this seminar will examine the cultural history of race as it was articulated in literature and visual culture from the late colonial period to the present. We will pay special attention to concepts such as pureza de sangre, negritud, whitening, racial passing, and mestizaje. The course will be accompanied by a distinguished speaker series, which will require that three classes from the semester meet later during the day. Reading proficiency in Spanish is required.

Languages and Cultures of Asia 428/Art History 428
Preeti Chopra
Monday/Wednesday 2:30-3:45
L150 Conrad A Elvehjem Building

This lecture course concentrates on the images (art, advertisements, photography, television, and cinema), material culture (such as, clothing), and environments (architecture, urban planning, and public rituals) of India.

During the semester, we will examine South Asian visual cultures from the ancient to the modern periods. This historical trajectory will be complemented by a critical focus on selected thematic issues. During these moments we will compare and contrast cases studies from across India, spatially and temporally. These historical ruptures, or time travels, will allow us to see the continuities and discontinuities between the past and present. Thematic issues and ideas that will be examined in this class include sexuality, the representation of women, patronage, cultural encounter and cultural synthesis, iconoclasm, the relationship between landscape and architecture, rethinking the canon, ways of seeing, art and craft, the sacred and secular, colonialism, modernism, nationalism, and the pleasures of Indian cinema. No prior knowledge of India is necessary.

Course description

Languages and Cultures of Asia 621/Art History 621: Mapping, Making, and Representing Colonial Spaces
Preeti Chopra
Monday 5:00-7:00

The spatial legacy of colonialism continues to live with us in the present. It plays a role in molding the postcolonial spaces of the future, both in former centers of colonial rule (such as London, Paris) and also in former colonies (such as India, Vietnam). “Colonialism” is often used to describe a very specific type of cultural and material exploitation that accompanied the territorial expansion of Europe across much of the world over the last 400 years. This graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar explores several important ways in which the population, landscape, architecture, and urban environment of these territories were mapped, made, and represented, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. Our primary settings will be territories under British colonial rule. Topics to be considered include: the mapping of newly colonized territories; hybridity; the making of colonial cities; colonialism and photography. Emulating the geographical spread of colonialism, theoretical and empirical analyses will travel across diverse disciplinary and spatial terrain, drawing on works in architectural and urban history, cultural studies, anthropology, and critical human geography.

Course description

Literature in Translation 241/Slavic 242: Literatures and Cultures of Eastern Europe
Dijana Mitrovic
Tuesday/Thursday 2:30-3:45

In this class we will study cultures of Eastern and Central Europe through works of literature, theatre, and film produced between the end of WWII and the fall of the Berlin Wall (1945–1989). Special focus will be placed on the strategies political regimes were employing to control artistic production during the Cold War era, as the subversive techniques of resistance that artists and authors used in return. Apart from learning about the region of the time, the class material will help us recognize/resist various forms of (self)censorship in general, thus making us better scholars, artists, and citizens of the world.

Course description

Fall 2016

Art History 355: History and Theory of Photography
Jill Casid
Tuesday/Thursday 11:00 – 12:15pm
Elvehjem L140

The course offers an introduction to the history and theory of the diverse and pervasive field of photography from its origins in the desire to work with light and shadows to declarations of its death in the drive toward the digital. The course emphasizes that to understand the history of photography means exploring the range of photography’s social, political and cultural practices from the documentary to the selfie and Instagram, from the conventions of the photo I.D. and tactics of surveillance to the use of photography in avant-garde art practices. The readings for the course will also introduce you to the important critics who have engaged with photography in their work and whose studies of photography demonstrate in various ways how issues of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and economic, historical, and geopolitical relations of power are inseparable from the historical study of the medium of photography — its practice, dissemination, valuation, and interpretation. No prior knowledge of the history of photography or art history is assumed or required.

Art History/Languages and Cultures of Asia 379, Section 1: Cities of Asia
Preeti Chopra
Monday/Wednesday 2:30 – 3:45pm

This semester long survey course, presents a historical overview of the built environment of the cities of Asia from antiquity to the present.  Most surveys of the city focus on the West, even though the earliest neolithic settlements are found in western Asia, and the first true cities were constructed between the Tigris and Euphrates around 3500 B.C.  Max Weber’s work on the City was influential in drawing a contrast between Western and non-Western cities, arguing that ‘urban communities’ and hence ‘true cities’ were only found in the West.  This course seeks does not seek to essentialize Western or non-Western cities.  Instead, it seeks to explore and tease out common themes that thread through the diverse geographical regions and cultures of Asia.

The aim of this course is to examine the architectural and urban legacy of the past and present in its social and historical context.  In this course, we will look at the rise of cities in Asia, study the influence of Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman planning traditions on their colonies in Asia, examine debates surrounding the Islamic city, explore the role of religious ideas and practices in shaping the city, and discuss the relationship between sovereign power and the city.  We will then move on to see the ways in which colonial ideologies were used to reshape existing cities and build new ones. In the postcolonial context, this course will analyze the rise of nationalism and the influence of western architects and planners such as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn in introducing “modernization” and shaping a vision of architecture and urbanism appropriate to the newly independent states of Asia.  As the world becomes increasingly integrated into a global network, we see the emergence of world cities in Asia.  At the same, a large majority of the population in many Asian cities lives in slums.  Are these spaces of despair or can they also be seen as vibrant settlements?  We will look at both the origins of cities and their transformation over time, and examine the physical city in order to understand the texture of urban life.

Art History 800/Art History 500: What is Art History?
Jill Casid
Thursday 4:15 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L166

This seminar is conceived to run alongside my finishing of a book that is designed to be used in seminars such as this one on the latest theories and methods for doing art history now. The book titled “What is Art History?” is a critical reframing of the field’s methods commissioned by London-based Polity Press for their “What is History?  series. This book and the seminar move through a sequence of critical questions that motivate research and critical practice now from questions of desire to who or what is the subject. The book and seminar demonstrate ways of doing an art history that is rooted rhizomatically in genealogies of the contemporary with special attention to shifts in contemporary art practice globally, reorganized in recognition of the problematics of a post-medium situation, and capable of reckoning not only with the globally transmissible image and the ubiquity of projection but also with its roots in the photographic, filmic, and performative. These still unresolved problematics from the live questions of what is the object (with attention to new materialism) to how we pursue the conflicting temporalities and directionalities of the history in art history opens historiography to the tests of practice as the course moves through a sequence of constellations of foundational texts read alongside the newest and most exciting challenges to the field from queer and crip theory to biopolitics and necropolitics. The particular topics (as well as the form and style) of final projects will necessarily be open as the aim is to have the work that you pursue further your particular research interests and develop your portfolio.
Art History 802/African American Studies 802/Languages and Cultures of Asia 630: The Everyday: Lives, Spaces, and Things
Preeti Chopra
Monday 5:00 – 7:00pm

What is the everyday and how can one discuss it? This seminar tries to tackle these questions by taking on the difficult-to-grasp subject of the everyday. For Lefebvre, the everyday is what remains after we have deleted all specialized, structured activities.  Thus it can appear to be anonymous, undated, insignificant and outside the disciplines of knowledge.  Yet Lefebvre also insists, “everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts.” Indeed, it can be seen as very powerful. Some theorists, like Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau see in the everyday a relation to power, in particular as a way through the quotidian, the ordinary and the repetitive a capacity to resist the capitalist economy and governmental authority. As one can see from these definitions, the problem with everyday life is that is both a nebulous and expansive concept: to think about it is to realize that it encompasses a vast domain constituting both our conscious and unconscious worlds, the appearance of things and what lies behind them.  The everyday is not as it appears.

In this class, we will explore concepts of the everyday and how it relates to space, material culture, our bodies, our perception, and practices.  For example, we will examine why Lefebvre argued that everyday life was sustained by material culture and that social life was embedded in space.  We will also consider how the architectural historian Dell Upton concludes that the power to control society is linked to the ability to govern repetitions and thereby shape various aspects of an individual’s being.  These ideas are most clearly articulated in the work of the anthropologist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his idea of habitus or practical sense that ties together space, time, bodily habits and cultural memory. Thus, in this course we will examine how distinct theories and practices have interrogated and engaged with the everyday, while paying special attention to issues of power, space, bodies, and materiality to look beyond the appearances of the everyday.

Comparative Literature 203, Lecture 001: Calling Planet Earth. Introduction to Environmental Humanities
Frederic Neyrat
Monday/Wednesday 1:20 – 2:10pm
6104 Social Science Bldg.

We live on Earth, but do we know exactly what the Earth is? Is it a mere planet wandering in a cold universe? The quasi-living ecosphere some thinkers call “Gaia”? Or a sort of “spaceship” that geoengineers can enhance and pilot? Drawing on literature (Sun Ra, J.M. Coetzee), cinema (Gravity, Promised Land), philosophy (H. Arendt), science (P. Crutzen), environmental history (W. Cronon), and anthropology (T. Ingold), this class investigates the crucial issues of our terrestrial condition. If we want to address the environmental problems that humans are confronted with (climate change, loss of biodiversity, technological risks, environmental inequity), we need to change our representations of nature, humans, and technology.

Life Sciences Communication 350: Visualizing Science & Technology
Tues. / Thurs., 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.
119 Babcock, 1605 Linden Drive
Shiela Reaves
Professor, Department of Life Sciences Communication
University of Wisconsin-Madison
E-mail: sireaves@wisc.edu
Office hours: Tues/Thurs 1–2 p.m. & by appointment
228 Hiram Smith Hall, 1545 Observatory Drive

Visualizing Science & Technology explores the multidisciplinary dimensions of “the visual brain” in order to attract audiences in the media and science communication. This course is primarily interested in the brain’s first two seconds, a key window of attention, for communicating visual media messages. Since the visual brain is shaped by culture and autobiography, LSC 350 draws from core principles in vision science, visual behavior and visual cultures. Specifically, this intermediate-level course explores the visual culture of news imagery, early neuro-processing centers of form, color, depth and movement; mid-level processing of gestalt pattern-finding and depth; higher-level cognition of attentive viewing found in photojournalism, visual ethics, symbols, cultural space of maps, and visualizing data in media charts and graphs. Students expand their own observation skills by understanding the power of visual imagery.

Lectures introduce a visual theory each week while student-led discussions explore dynamic, visual examples across media, science and technology. Students write media critiques applying visual communication theories to media depictions that they select. Active participation and attendance are required. The take-home final exam integrates student final presentations applying visual critical thinking skills. Student-selected topics span diverse fields such as genetics, science and health communications, agriculture, environmental sciences, strategic marketing, cultural communication, news editing, media design and visual media communication.

Course Objectives:

• Explore visual communication theory using media depictions across science, technology and visual cultures

• Understand how core processing channels of the visual system allow us to notice visual impact as well as subtle nuance as we attend to dynamic visual messages

• Support a class dialogue of diverse opinions and “ways of knowing” across the media, humanities, social sciences and core principles in visual processing

Full Syllabus

Spring 2016

Art History 372: Arts of Japan
Professor Gene Phillips
qephilli@wisc.edu
Elvehjem L140
MWF 9:55 – 10:45

This course introduces students to the history and aesthetics of Japanese art from some of the world’s earliest pottery to examples of anime-inspired art of today. It explores the forms, contexts, and meanings of works of painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics, prints, and other selected media. It looks at the social, religious, and other functions of art works in various social and aesthetic environments, including early tombs, the ancient imperial court, early medieval Zen monasteries, tea ceremony circles, the floating world of visual and erotic pleasure found in early modern cities, and the global spaces of contemporary art. Class participation is encouraged and rewarded.

Learning Objectives:
Knowledge about a fascinating culture and its art
Sharpened ability to perceive and interpret visual information
Improved critical reading skills
Greater sophistication in writing

Art History 603: Curatorial Studies Colloquium
Professor Henry Drewal
hjdrewal@wisc.edu
Elvehjem L166
Th 7:00 – 9:00pm

This course is designed to introduce advanced undergraduate students (and graduate students) to a broad range of questions, both theoretical and practical, related to curatorial practice. The core of the course is a series of sessions on curatorial strategies. Particular emphasis will be placed on integrative and collaborative approaches to curating a wide variety of material: art, film, music, books, anthropology/culture, archeology, history, geology, zoology, dance, etc. With this ideal in mind, we will bring in a series of experts to engage with each other and with the class on the theories, objectives, and processes of conceiving, designing, and mounting exhibitions, as well as reaching different audiences with both physical and virtual exhibitions. Students will also be introduced to the distinctive collections and resources on campus and in the region.

Some of our opening questions/issues might be: What is curation? How has it changes over time? What are its possible futures? What is the nature of collecting and exhibiting? Rethinking creation, interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination.

Student assignments (both individual and collaborative) include: two exhibition reviews, reading responses, and a final research paper focused on a curatorial project.

Art History 879: Carnival Arts of Resistance and Empowerment
Professor Henry Drewal
hjdrewal@wisc.edu
Elvehjem L166
Wed 4:30 – 6:30pm

African Diaspora art history is the story of resistance, subversion, accommodation, and transformation. This course explores the arts of Carnival, a specific pre-Lenten Christian festival that has served as a vehicle for the agency of African peoples and their descendants in the Americas. We will consider how and why African diasporic peoples have shaped and been shaped by historical factors and cultural values (social, political, religious, philosophical, and aesthetic) in the face of hegemonic forces that attempted to suppress or eradicate them. The specific sites will include: Puerto Rico, Panama, New Orleans, Trinidad and its Diasporas (Toronto/Brooklyn), and Brazil.

From the fifteenth century, European expansion greatly intensified the global encounters of cultures with radically different forms and concepts of art and artistic production. In the Americas such encounters involved primarily Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples. The interactions of these three groups contributed to the formulation of distinctive arts — visual and performance cultures.

In the Americas, Africans had to devise new strategies and tactics to ensure the survival, continuity, and vitality of their cultural and artistic heritages in the face of hegemonic forces — slavery, conversion, and oppression. In this course, the central hypothesis to be examined and tested is that the arts (carnival arts in particular) have been and continue to be vehicles for self and social assertion and agency – that the arts can and do shape society and history. Our central questions are: What is the nature of the agency of such carnival arts? Do they create something new or simply accommodate and reinforce existing power relations?

Design Studies 501-021: Design Trends: Material Culture of Contemporary Design
Professor Mark Nelson
mark.nelson@wisc.edu
Van Hise Hall 583
Tues & Th 2:30 – 3:45pm

The Design Trends course examines contemporary design and designers in the ever more closely related practices of interior design, textile/apparel design, architecture, and product/furnishings design. Looked at through the lens of material culture, these practices are tied together by their attention to the relationship between objects, environments, human bodies, sensory experience and culture.  The course begins with a look back at 19th and 20th century design, putting current designers into context.  Next, the course is divided into thematic sections based on stylistic and theoretical intentions (such as Postmodernism, Expressivism, Deconstructivism, Neo-Punk, Minimalism, Biomorphism, Street Design and Neo-Pop). For an example, see https://www.pinterest.com/designtrend/postmodern-decorative-design-traditional/  The last part of the semester focuses on broad topics through a material culture lens, with areas that include socially conscious design, virtual design (including technologically/digitally driven design), critical design/art, anti-design/lowbrow design, subculture design and guesses about the future of design.

Lectures address these thematic sections and incorporate examples from each of the practice areas, studying ways that they overlap as well as diverge, and are augmented by discussion and student presentations: over the course of the semester, students find and report on designers from the broad thematic sections, with the option to choose designers from their own practice areas.  Additionally students find and post links referencing current designers on a recurring basis, and complete readings on a regular basis.  For a final project, students choose the work of a designer and construct a critical analysis; in addition to written text, students may develop a visual narrative using multimedia or their own creative work.

Course Objectives:
The course is especially meant to develop students’ ability to identify and critically analyze designs that are current and that might not yet have been studied or written about extensively. It is aimed at students from all disciplines who have an interest in current trends in design, including students from design, from retailing, from art history, from art and from material culture.

Specific areas that will be addressed include:
A broad exposure to the breadth of designers and design trends both within and outside the commercial arena
The ability to research contemporary designers and relate the designers’ ideas to those of other designers
The enrichment of students’ design skills outside of their standard education and discipline
The ability to write about, create and discuss abstract design ideas and concepts
The ability to apply material culture approaches an methods to designs
An appreciation of the overlap between disciplines within design
An appreciation of the overlap between design and other disciplines
An appreciation for the possibilities of design as an activist endeavor

English 706: How To Do Things with Words Images, Objects, and Sounds: Beyond Textual Rhetorics
Professor Christa Olson
christa.olson@wisc.edu
Wed 1:00 – 3:30pm
Helen C. White 7105

Rhetoric has never been just about words. Rhetorical theory and practice across time and space have brimmed over with bodies and actions, with pictures and places; for a long time, though, it was possible to study rhetoric without acknowledging any of those things (except, perhaps, the rocks in Demosthenes’ mouth). Not so today. Some present-day scholars still, like Quintillian, distinguish the sheer linguistic aspects of “oratory” (or writing) from the more messy terrain of persuasion, where clothing and scars and the presence of one’s children might influence the jury. For the most part, however, we recognize that even those artifacts that appear entirely linguistic—speeches or published essays, for example—are shot through with images (black text on white paper), sounds (the rise and fall of pitch), and things (the podium and pen). This course takes a romp through the current state of scholarship on rhetoric beyond and beneath the textual, offering as well a brief history of the transition from a primarily text-obsessed field to one rife with sorts of material. In addition to reading (and viewing) recent scholarship and talking with rhetorical scholars, we will try our own hands at making and doing rhetorical analysis across media and modes. Likely course materials include Brown’s Ethical Programs, Finnegan’s Making Photography Matter, Horner, Selfe, & Lockridge’s Translinguality, Transmodality, and Difference, and Gries’ Still Life With Rhetoric.

Spanish 882: Latin American Visual Culture, Theatre and Performance Art
Professor Paola Hernández
pshernandez@wisc.edu
355 Van Hise Hall
Tues 3:30 – 5:30pm

This course is relevant to Latin American studies, performance studies, visual culture and public humanities students. It explores the many ways Latin American visual culture, theatre and other performative acts define the role of citizenship in different stages of the 20th and 21st century. We will focus our studies on how citizenship categorizes identity at national and multinational dimensions, while at the same time engaging issues of legal, cultural and political rights. We will begin by reassessing paradigms such as Bertolt Brecht’s “Verfremdung,” Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed,” and anthropologist Victor Turner’s “social dramas” in an emerging global framework. To this end, we will consider the adoption of multilateral cultural and social networks, the establishment of international recognition and jurisdiction of human rights, the revision of physical and virtual borders, and changing notions of citizenship. Theorists, such as, Carlson, Taylor, Huyssen, Canclini, among others will help us identify more recent issues of citizenship in philosophy, anthropology and performance studies. Within this theoretical framework we will then focus on how visual arts, theatre and performative acts (political manifestations, public demonstrations, installations) both empower certain citizenship practices and participate in the critical analysis of the evolving discourse of citizenship. We will study a variety of Latin American plays in translation and U.S. Latino theatre.

This course is taught in English.

Fall 2015

Afro-American Studies 229 / Art History 241: Introduction to African Art and Architecture
Professor Henry Drewel, Art History Department

This course examines the rich heritage of African arts and architecture as they shape and have been shaped by the histories and cultural values (social, political, religious, philosophical, and aesthetic) of African peoples, both past and present, on the continent where humanity began. Given Africa’s enormous ecological and cultural diversity, we cannot be comprehensive. Instead, we present an historical overview that highlights selected artistic traditions from different parts of the continent from 26,000 BCE to the 20th century and introductory case studies of specific cultures throughout history; genres; artistic movements; and individual artists. We do not have a passive, objective relationship to Africa, its people, and its artistry – we have been shaped by Euro-American culture and a deeply embedded history of racism. Where possible the course highlights historical and contemporary intersections between Africa and Euro-America, demonstrating that our exploration of this art history is as much an encounter with our own cultural values as those of the peoples from whom the art originates.

Afro-American Studies 272: We Wear the Mask: Race and Representation
Professor Johanna Almiron, Afro-American Studies
Inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear The Mask,”(1896) this inter-disciplinary course examines how race is constructed through representations in art, art history, museums, popular culture (film) and popular media (television). As a means to gain media literacy, students will learn how to recognize and analyze racial stereotypes in relation to the concepts of social inequality and white privilege. While there is an emphasis on racial representations, the course will also examine intersections with gender, sexuality and class. This course will examine how contemporary artists have engaged these stereotypes as a means to reproduce alternative visual representations of history, culture and race. (Cross-list with Ethnic Studies programs, Media/Communication Arts)
Selected texts and films: Gender, Race, and Class in Media, A Critical Reader, Edited by Gail Dines, Jean M. Humes; Selections from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, bell hooks’ Black Looks: Race and Representations, Marlon Riggs’ Ethnic Notions, Robert G. Lee’s Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Shilpa Dave’s Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film, Frances Negron-Muntaner’s Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture, Arlene Davila’s Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race, Haunani-Kay Trask’s Notes from A Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i.

Afro-American Studies 679: Divas and Dandy-lions: Visual Culture, Gender and Critical Race Theory
Professor Johanna Almiron, Afro-American Studies
T 1:20-3:15
Email: almiron@wisc.edu

With a focus on the cultural production of the 20th and 21st century, this inter-disciplinary course examines how the visual informs the construction of race, gender and sexuality within social and historical contexts. Students will study Black visual culture through the historical origins of world fair displays and museums (bodies and art objects as ethnographic study), fashion (dress, style, culturally-coded representation, photography), popular culture and mainstream entertainment (film, television) to policy, social protest and cultural movements. How do Black artists and curators engage, challenge and/or appropriate these visual representations? How do these cultural practitioners create counter-narratives against stereotyping and seek to produce alternative imagery? How do Black artists negotiate the subjective binaries of masculinity/femininity, straight/gay identities and further offer queer and transgender frameworks to understand race, culture and society? (Cross-list with Women Studies, Art History)

Selected texts, films and artists: Jacqueline Bobo’s Black Feminist Cultural Criticism, Lisa E. Farrington’s Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women, Jose Munoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Thelma Golden’s Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art, Deborah Willis’ Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning; Carrie Mae Weems, Faith Ringgold, Bettye and Alison Saar, Renee Cox, Lorna Simpson, Julie Dash, Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, among others.

Art History 379/Languages and Cultures of Asia 379: Cities of Asia
Professor Preeti Chopra, Art History Department
This semester long survey course, presents a historical overview of the built environment of the cities of Asia from antiquity to the present.  Most surveys of the city focus on the West, even though the earliest neolithic settlements are found in western Asia, and the first true cities were constructed between the Tigris and Euphrates around 3500 B.C.  Max Weber’s work on the City was influential in drawing a contrast between Western and non-Western cities, arguing that ‘urban communities’ and hence ‘true cities’ were only found in the West.  This course seeks does not seek to essentialize Western or non-Western cities.  Instead, it seeks to explore and tease out common themes that thread through the diverse geographical regions and cultures of Asia.

The aim of this course is to examine the architectural and urban legacy of the past and present in its social and historical context.  In this course, we will look at the rise of cities in Asia, study the influence of Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman planning traditions on their colonies in Asia, examine debates surrounding the Islamic city, explore the role of religious ideas and practices in shaping the city, and discuss the relationship between sovereign power and the city.  We will then move on to see the ways in which colonial ideologies were used to reshape existing cities and build new ones. In the postcolonial context, this course will analyze the rise of nationalism and the influence of western architects and planners such as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn in introducing “modernization” and shaping a vision of architecture and urbanism appropriate to the newly independent states of Asia.  As the world becomes increasingly integrated into a global network, we see the emergence of world cities in Asia.  At the same, a large majority of the population in many Asian cities lives in slums.  Are these spaces of despair or can they also be seen as vibrant settlements?  We will look at both the origins of cities and their transformation over time, and examine the physical city in order to understand the texture of urban life.

Art History 430/731: Topics in Visual Culture: The Artist as Scientist
Professor Shira Brisman, Art History Department

This course invites a historical approach to understanding how the energetic pursuit of knowledge spawned explosions of human creativity. We will take as our organizing principles three areas of scientific study—The body, the environment, and outer space.
Picture this: a drawing of conjoined twins in a womb; an instrument for measuring geological time; a calendar proscribing when to go to war. Art and science—though often positioned as separate modes of inquiry—in fact are motivated by shared goals. Focusing on the period of 1450-1650, from the birth of Leonardo da Vinci to the death of Galileo Galilei, this course invites a historical approach to understanding how the energetic pursuit of knowledge spawned both inventions that celebrated human creativity and discoveries that exposed the elegance of nature. Taking as our organizing principles three areas of scientific study—the Body, the Land and Outer Space—we will pursue such topics as: pre-modern anatomical treatises; medicinal plant manuals; advice treatises on sex and conception; Renaissance-era robots and machines; tools devised by cartographers and astronomers; and the first engravings of the moon as seen through a telescope. Emphasizing skills in research, writing, and presentation, this course invites students interested in Art History, the History of Science, Mathematics, and Technology, Pre-Med, Philosophy, the culture of early printed books, or anyone lured by beautiful and strange things.

Art History 579/879: Pro/Seminar in African Art: Masquerades and the Senses
Professor Henry Drewal, Art History Department

This pro/seminar explores the artistry of African and African Diaspora masquerade performances and the crucial role of the senses in the creative process and in our understanding of these aesthetic experiences with an approach I term Sensiotics. Since the focus on the body is receiving renewed attention, As engaged scholars (individually and collectively), we will participate in the masquerading traditions of Halloween & Day of the Dead identify and evaluate the literature on the present state of our knowledge of the senses, the body-mind (cognitive) sciences, and their relevance for understanding the arts. Elements of this pro/seminar may also be integrated with those of the Arts Institute Artist-in Residence – master Cuban musician Juan de Marcos.

We will first consider cultural theories and practices surrounding masquerades – their psychological and philosophical foundations in culture and history, and some of the ways to study masking arts and performance using a variety of sources (written, oral, experiential), and especially multi-sensorial ones. Then we will critically evaluate these with reference to African and African Diaspora materials as a prelude to the preparation of individual or collaborative research projects and presentations by pro/seminar members. The first seminar presentations will be done by the instructor based upon his research in Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America, using PowerPoint presentations, sound recordings, and film. There may also be guest presenters.

Design Studies 642/Art History 500/Art History 800: Taste

Professor Preeti Chopra, Art History Department

This seminar will explore the idea of taste – both “good” and bad”, in “popular” and “high” culture – drawing on material from the United States, Europe, and South Asia. Taste has at least two meanings, both of which concern the faculty of perception.  The first, an older meaning, is used in a physical sense to convey the sensation caused in the mouth when it comes in contact with a flavor, or a small sample of food.  The second meaning is obtained from developments in intellectual culture deriving from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the word became increasingly important and complex.  The second meaning of taste went beyond simple liking or preference for something, to include the notion of discrimination.  Here, the ability to distinguish between something that was beautiful, ugly, or merely pleasant, was an attribute of someone that exhibited “good taste.”  However, both the words tasteful and tasteless emerged during the same period.  So who decides what constitutes “good” taste or “bad” taste?

There is no escaping from matters of taste – we judge others and are judged on the basis of our individual tastes.  In our everyday actions, each one of us is seen as a consumer exercising our personal taste, our purely subjective preferences, in the choices we make, from the art and movies we view, or the books we read, to the clothes we wear, and the food we eat.  But is taste personal or collective?  We all know that taste is shared in a particular period and place, such as the “Victorian” taste that dominated late-nineteenth century Britain.  And yet, even as we might conform to publicly sanctioned attitudes about certain styles, we still assert our individual preferences.  Do we belong to particular taste cultures and taste publics?  What is the relationship between taste and shared institutions and spaces that are supposed to represent the public?  Whose tastes are considered and whose are not?  Who should decide?  How should decisions be made?

In this seminar, we will read both historical and theoretical works on the idea of taste, and examine works of architecture, landscape, art, articles of clothing, and public space.  The readings will be drawn from a wide range of disciplines including architectural, and art history, anthropology, sociology, and material culture.

Gender and Women’s Studies 372: Visualizing Bodies
Intructor Eunjung Kim, Gender and Women’s Studies
T/TR 11:00am-12:15pm
Email: ekim63@wisc.edu
Ingraham 224

Writing intensive.

Why and how do we look at the images of bodies experiencing pain, violence, and global injustice? What assumptions and desires are embedded in the practice of looking and what identities are constructed in the interaction between the viewers, the images, and the persons who are represented in the images? Do the images of vulnerability and suffering bring actions and changes based on solidarity? Visualizing Bodies focuses on these questions in the intersections of the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of visual images of Othered bodies in humanitarian communcations from transnational feminist disability studies perspectives. In addition, students will learn a history of humanitarian media and their relationship with transnational hierarchies. Students will practice critical analyses of visual media including photography, NGO campaigns, and documentaries, focusing on race, ethnicity, gender, class, disability, health, religion, sexuality and other markers of differences, while taking structural, historical, and cultural conditions into account.

History 125 / Environmental Studies 125 / History of Science 125: Green Screen: Environmental Perspectives Through Film
Professor Gregg Mitman, Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies

From Teddy Roosevelt’s 1909 African safari to the Hollywood blockbuster King Kong, from the world of Walt Disney to The March of the Penguins, cinema has been a powerful force in shaping public and scientific understanding of nature throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. How can film shed light on changing environmental ideas and beliefs in American thought, politics, and culture? And how can we come to see and appreciate contested issues of race, class, and gender in nature on screen? This course will explore such questions as we come to understand the role of film in helping to define the contours of past, present, and future environmental visions in the United States. and their impact on the real world struggles of people and wildlife throughout the world.

History 201: Ways of Seeing: Visual Archives and Visual History

Professor Florence Bernault, History Department
M/W 4:00-5:15
Soc Sci 6116

Many documents used by historians come in visual form. Today, graphic incidents and strategies increasingly contribute to shaping history (think, for instance, about the Abu Ghraib prison pictures released in 2004, or the beheading of US and British hostages released online by Al Qaida). This course will help you to engage with various visual sources overtime (paintings, maps, caricature, cartoons, advertising, photographs, movies, objects and architectural designs), to analyse them critically, and to utilize them to compose historical narratives.

During the first part of the semester, we will discuss the production, diffusion and reception of images from the 15th to the 20th century, approaching them as sources and as “actors” with a historical agency of their own. The second part of the semester will concentrate on the visual dimension of power struggles in the modern era (18th- 21st century).

This course has a sizable historical methods component and offers an opportunity to experience the excitement and rewards of doing original historical research and conveying the results of that work to others. Students will gain hands-on experience doing archival research and will share their research findings with the class in oral presentations.  At the end of the semester each student will submit a 10-page research paper on a topic relating to the course theme. (A number of the shorter course papers are designed to help students develop a research proposal, a research plan, and ultimately the paper itself.)

Life Sciences Communication 350: Visualizing Science & Technology
Professor Shiela Reaves, Department of Life Sciences Communication

Visual theory survey course; principles of neuroscience applied to media images for communicating visually to audiences.

History 600: Modern Objects and Their Histories

Professor Lee Palmer Wandel, Department of History

In the early modern world, things—feathers, shells, rugs, porcelain, dyes, glazes, wood, stone, plants—traveled as never before, and Europeans collected them, first in curiosity cabinets and then in museums. We shall begin with cabinets of curiosity and the movement of things.
Each student in this seminar will then choose a specific object from the early modern world; research where it came from, its production (if a made object), and circulation; and explore its meanings and/or values in changing contexts.  Students will be required to write a 25-page research paper on an object, its history, and its meanings and values in the early modern world.

History of Science 350: Things not Words: Using Material Culture

Science is what happens when ideas meet things. When what we’d like to be true collides with nature. This course shows you how that works.

Based around UW-Madison’s remarkable history, collections and architecture, this practically oriented course will give you hands-on experience of how material culture changes our understanding of science, its history, its relationship to the arts and humanities, and its placein wider society. It will also introduce you to current research in this area – right here in Madison.

The class will involve regular field trips to collections in local/campus museums, including visits to the Zoology Museum, Special Collections, and to see the Chemistry Department¹s resident glassblower at work.

This interdisciplinary course is suitable for undergraduate students in history of science, history and the sciences, as well as for those in anthropology, art history, and architecture. The course is also open to graduate students. Any student with an interest in visual and material culture or museum studies should consider taking this course. Interested students should contact me directly to discuss their particular circumstances.

Syllabus
Poster

History of Science 909: History of Biology and Medicine
Professor Lynn Nyhart, History of Science Department
Professor Tom Broman, History of Science Department
Topic: The New History of Natural History

In the past 15 years, the history of natural history has flourished as an area of scholarly inquiry across many disciplines—history of science, art and visual culture history, museum and material culture studies, and literary studies. This graduate seminar samples three especially significant themes in this new wave of scholarship, investigating natural history’s intersections with a) travel and empire; b) visual and material culture; and c) scientific practice.

This is primarily a reading seminar: you should expect to read a book and possibly some additional articles per week, and come to seminar prepared to talk about them. Students will be assigned as discussion-launcher (or co-launcher) for at least one week (depends on the size of the class).

Writing: students may choose a writing assignment of approximately 15 pages that is suited to their interests and stage of graduate career: a) a historiographic essay of on one of the three themes, expanding the list from the core readings;  b) a historiographic essay that develops your own theme, covering an equivalent number of books (including some from the core readings, some from outside);  or c) a detailed proposal for a research project using primary and secondary sources related to the history of natural history.